by Riley Morgan
Ramon informed the officer that there was a civilian family in the building. The odds of structural damage to the home and of shrapnel from the blast causing civilian casualties was, in Ramon’s opinion, very high.
The CO gave the order again, and Ramon sighted his weapon. As he looked down the groove sight, he saw the grandmother holding her granddaughter, a girl no older than five, in her lap, singing and bouncing her.
Ramon refused to fire.
His CO ordered Ramon to stand down and had another soldier fire on the courtyard. It felt like an eternity between the hollow thump of the grenade launcher and the blast in the courtyard. The building was about two hundred yards from their position, and it took the sound of the blast almost a full second to reach them. It was an underwhelming rumble, and it was followed by screams.
Two days later, as Ramon was being sent to a base in Germany to await court martial, he saw a cart rolling down the road behind a tired mule. It was lead by a man and his young son. In the back of the cart were three bodies under white shrouds, covered with small mountain flowers. One of the bodies was very small.
A week later, Ramon learned, the man approached a patrol from his squad and detonated a suicide vest, killing two Marines. Gabe was with the patrol, and had lost both legs from the knees down.
Naturally, Ramon was hesitant to tell Gabe that he had another problem.
“What’s the trouble?” Gabe asked.
“It’s a girl.”
“Oh brother. Not the girl, I hope.”
“She’s in big trouble brother.”
“Well yea, her dad’s a crazy drug lord and her brothers are lunatics. If she wasn’t in big trouble, she wouldn’t have needed you.”
“No, it’s worse than that.”
“How could it be worse that that?” Gabe asked. Then, because he was a smart man, he started to piece things together. “Wait a minute, you didn’t go falling over this girl did you?”
“That doesn’t matter,” Ramon said.
“It kind of matters.”
“Look, her dad is marrying her off to some piece of shit rich boy who’s going to kill her before his first anniversary. That’s the best case scenario.”
“Worst case?”
“Papa Buldova has serious beef with this family. The wedding is supposed to be on a big boat, everyone’s going to be there And Gabe, I found a few dozen det caps in their garage.”
“You don’t think…”
“I do, and I think that crazy mothrfucker is going to use his daughter as bait to do it.”
Gabe was quiet for a minute.
“That’s fucked up man,” was all he said.
“I know.”
Ramon folded his hands and finished his drink in one long swallow. He sat staring at the empty glass while Gabe thought.
“What can I do to help?”
Ramon had been up half the night trying to figure that out. So far, he’d only come up with one really good answer.
“I’m going to need some really fucking big guns.”
Lena
“Lena, I need to talk to you,” said Zeus, poking his head out of his office door and talking to Lena who was sitting on the couch, staring into space. Ever since Ramon left, she’d felt empty, like she was just waiting to die. She wouldn’t, not without a fight, but it wasn’t time for that yet. All she could do was wait and watch what happened.
She got up and walked into her stepfather's office, saying nothing.
“We need to talk about your responsibilities, Lena.”
“Ok.”
“When you marry Damien, you’re going to go back to his family’s home. Now, you know that things between our family and the Acalas are… complicated.”
“Sure.”
“Your marriage to their son with cement a mutually beneficial business arrangement between our families, but the two of us still have, let’s say, several competing interests.”
“Uh huh.”
“Pay attention to me girl. While you’re there, I want you to pay careful attention to what the Acalas say. What they do. Look for specific details. And then, you call your old man because he’s lonely now without his only daughter, and you tell him anything you hear. Yes?”
“Of course, father.”
“Don’t get smart with me girl. This family has given you everything. I’ve worked my hands to the bone so that you could have the life that you do. Well it’s time to give back. This is important, and if you do a good job, you might be able to come home in a few years.”
“I understand,” Lena said through gritted teeth.
“You’ll need to be careful, of course. If Damien or his father or anyone in the Acala family catches you doing this, I don’t need to tell you what will happen.”
When Zeus said “I don’t need to tell you”, it was his special way of saying “you are going to die”.
Lena said that she knew, and she did. She’d grown up in one murderous, psychotic family. Now she was going to join another, and play double agent between them. She had no doubt that as soon as she was away from Zeus, the Acala’s would be trying to extract any information from her that they could. And if Zeus found out that she’d given them anything, well, he didn’t have to tell her what he’d do.
“Is there anything else?”
“One more thing. Due to a few complications in your wedding arrangements, the ceremony has been delayed for a few days. I’ll give you the new itinerary as it comes together. That is all.”
Lena left her step-father in his office and went back to her bedroom where she could be as far away from him as possible. For the first time in a long time, she was leaving one of his meetings with good news.
She buried her face into her pillow so that nobody would hear her laughing with joy.
Ramon
Ramon left his fancy new car with Gabe. Gabe understood that driving around in a drug lord’s car was dangerous, but he had some friends who owed him a favor, and they fixed it right up for him. The car was, like the valet’s tip, Ramon’s way of spreading his wealth around before embarking on a suicide mission. It was also a thank you to Gabe for his help, which was now sitting in the back of the rental car that Ramon was driving back into the swamp.
The drive back took almost twice as long as the last time he’d taken these roads. The tired old rental didn’t feel half as safe at sixty miles an hour as the GT-R had at twice that. He sighed as the trees seemed to drift past him in no particular hurry, and counted the hours.
By his estimate, the family would be leaving around noon. Ramon was going to sit on the main road where he could see the gate and watch for any departing vehicles. Then he’d move up to the blind spot in the road, block it with his car, then run to the shoulder in the opposite direction to cut off their escape route. There were several weak points in his plan. One was that the driver of the car might be insane and try to run him down. Ramon had tried to get some assurance against this b getting the biggest, scariest looking gun that he could from Gabe.
Ramon would not fire on the car, not with Lena inside. He just wanted the driver to know that Ramon would not need particularly impressive accuracy to ruin his day.
He sat now with a pair of binoculars trained on the Buldova gate. He could actually see into the courtyard, at least a little. A sleek black car pulled up in front of the house. Ramon watched as a few big men hauled bags into the car and then went to the door. They came back with two people following behind them. It was hard to tell, but one of them was a small woman with brown hair. Ramon breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t missed her.
He moved the car into position and ran across the street to crouch behind a bush and hide. There was the purr of an engine and the crunching of tires on gravel. Through the underbrush, he could see the sleek black car pulling close, the sun glinting from the steel chassis.
As it pulled into the intersection and stopped, Ramon jumped out from behind the brush, rifle drawn, and walked in front of the car.
“
Hands up,” he screamed to the driver. “Step out of the car.”
The driver looked over at the goon next to him. They both put their hands on their head and got out. THey did not look pleased to see their old colleague.
Ramon ordered them to lay down on the road and told them not to move. The goons did not argue with the man with the big gun.
“Lena, it’s me. Get out and get to my car. We’re getting out of here.”
Nobody stirred from the inside of the car. Ramon took a wide arc around the outside of the car and looked into the back seat through the open driver side door. Inside was Basil, laughing and shaking his head. Next to him was a short woman with brown hair that Ramon had never seen before.
He’d fucked up. He’d made a mistake. He had to get out of here. Without saying anything, he began to walk towards his car keeping his weapon trained on the two men on the ground, ready to open fire if need be.
Ramon had almost made it back to his car when he heard the all too familiar sound of a gun being cocked.
“Why don’t you stay right there.” Andris said. ‘Do you have any idea how long I’ve been waiting in the fucking woods for you? Don’t run away now.”
Ramon started to turn his head, slowly, but Andris pushed the barrel of a handgun against his back and told him to freeze. Ramon surrendered his rifle and stood shocked in the middle of the street while Andris searched him. He found the revolver that Ramon had stolen from Zeus’s desk, and both knives that he kept strapped to his body.
“At least you came prepared.”
Ramon said nothing in response.
“What do we do with him now?”
“I want to play with him,” Andris said. “Maybe I can find out what he’s done with your car.”
“And dad’s money.”
Ramon saw a shadow move out of the corner of his eye, but was otherwise completely surprised when something struck him hard on the back of the head and his vision faded to black.
Lena
There was a commotion out in front of the house. Lena could hear Basil and Andris whooping and shouting. They were dragging something out of the back of a car towards the cellar. It wasn’t a new sight to Lena, and she normally looked away so that she didn’t have to know anything more than that somebody was about to die in her basement. Some morbid curiosity drove her to stand by the window and see what the brothers had dragged in.
It was Ramon.
She gasped at felt her heart pound. She’d noticed a silver car waiting outside the house all morning. She could just see the top of it from her window, but as much time as she’d spent staring out of it these days, she was bound to notice it. She ran upstairs to her room. The car was still there. She opened the glass door to her balcony and walked out onto it. She couldn’t get through the front gate, but if she could get around the wall without being noticed, she might be able to make it out to the car. If the keys were in it, as she’d expected they would be, she could make a break for it.
Her escape route from the balcony wasn’t going to work. There were too many henchmen in the courtyard, one of them would see her and they’d run out the gate and head her off. The pool was her best shot.
She moved as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself, and slipped onto the pool patio. The wall was high, and there wasn’t much to use to boost herself over, but she pushed a glass table against the wall and prayed that it would hold her weight. carefully, she climbed on top of it keeping her feet spread wide. It creaked and groaned, but it held. She grasped a vine that trailed over the wall and pulled herself on top of it. Crouched there, she looked to the other side. It was littered with empty bottles and cans that her step-brothers had tossed there. Most of the trees had recently been cut back away from the wall, and it was a ten foot drop straight down into mud. She looked for a firm piece of earth, shimmied along the wall, lowered herself down from the top, and dropped almost five feet to the mud.
When she hit the ground, her feet slid out from under her and she slammed into the earth on her side, knocking the wind out of her. Struggling back to her feet she began to move along the wall in spite of her pain. The path was mostly clear, and she didn’t have too hard of a time getting to the front of the complex. She worked her way deeper into the swamp, mud and stagnant water swallowing her feet up to the ankles. Thorns bit at her skin as she pushed through the untamed brush.
The road was about fifty feet in front of her. She couldn’t see the gate or the wall anymore, the forest was so thick. She picked her steps as carefully as she could, looking for stones or logs or anything solid to stand on. She was already exhausted, her body burned and ached and her muscles threatened to give out if she continued this abuse.
As she got nearer to the road, the ground firmed up and supported her through the last ten feet of briar. She emerged into the open, ten feet away from her ticket to freedom. She stepped out of the woods and onto the road, heading for the driver’s side door.
“Hey sis, what are you doing out here?”
Ramon
Ramon saw himself in the back of a car. He touched the back of his head and there was blood. He watched, as though outside of his own body, as he was dragged in front of the Buldova house around the corner to the side of the building. There was a door. He’d never been inside before, and the room that it was connected to was not accessible from the rest of the house. The walls were heavy brick and plaster inside, and the floor was poured concrete. It was dark.
The lights came on and Ramon saw that the floor had been many times covered in blood. Faint brown stains covered every inch of it in strange overlapping patterns so that the beginning of one pool could hardly be separated from the end of the other. In the middle of the room was a chair. It looked to be from a dentist or doctor’s office, although Ramon had doubted that the many straps and buckles were part of the original design. Ramon was still reeling from the blow to the head. He could hardly pick himself up off the floor, even by a few inches. The room spun. He had a hard time remembering where he was. He’d struggle and search for that information for a few minutes before finding it, realizing the danger that he was in, attempting to move, and collapsing. He repeated this cycle over and over while Andris and Basil stood over him, laughing.
In the last two weeks, they had come to envy him. He was a man. They were boys. They knew it. They were never subjected to the forces of life that make men as hard as Ramon was. They had never known the infinite sweetness that softened hearts as his had. They were cold, dispassionate, and perpetually unhappy. To see a man like Ramon, one who was at peace with himself but still formidable like an untouchable monolith, it drove them mad.
He was not so untouchable now.
They shouted and jeered as the toes of their boots slammed into Ramons ribs and kicked the air and sense out of his body. They were less than animals, huddling over him, panting and shouting as they pounded his body and stomped on his hands.
Ramon could hear them taunting him, but he could not string the words together to understand what they were saying. He did not need to. Many times, he lapsed back into unconsciousness. Each time became a scene in a movie. In Ramon’s memory, the scenes had been chopped up and spliced back together with long stretches of nothing, and with pieces of film that belonged to other times in Ramon’s life.
In truth, the Buldova family tortured him for nearly five days. To him, it could have been a lifetime, it could have been a lazy afternoon.
Lena
“Andris,” Lena said.
He was standing on the other side of the car when she ran out onto the road. He looked as surprised as she was to see her there.
“You shouldn’t be out of the house baby sister. It’s dangerous out here.”
She looked around for anything she might use as a weapon. She wasn’t above bludgeoning her step-brother if it meant getting away from here. There were a few big rocks on the side of the road. Andris stepped out from behind the car and she saw that he was carrying a machine gun half
as big as she was. He was casual about it, holding it by the pistol grip in one hand. When he notice her eyes go wide, seeing it, he hoisted it up to his hip and showed it off like a proud child on Christmas.
“Like it?” he said.
“Ramon brought it for me.”
He raised the gun to his shoulder and looked down the sights, sweeping it across the forest until it pointed straight at Lena.
“Like I said. Dangerous out here.”
Lena held her breath and prayed that she could be anywhere else right now.
“Get in,” he said, “I’ll take you back to the house.”
Lena climbed into the passenger seat of the car at gunpoint and tried to fight back tears as Andris drove her back to the house. The gate opened to let them in and then closed, trapping her there again. She sat there long after the car stopped, staring straight ahead. She held her head in her hands and stared at the floor sobbing. There, on the floor between her feet was a gleaming black pistol. It startled her, like a mechanized scorpion.
She never would have dreamed of picking it up and tucking it into the waistband of her jeans even two weeks ago, but life was different now, so that’s exactly what she did.
Andris took her inside, straight to her father’s office.
“I thought you’d like to know that I just caught this one trying to sneak away.”
In the past, Lena had captured her father’s favor, lying in the face of her stepbrothers’ truths. It did not always work, they were certainly his favorites, but she was as good a liar, as they were bad at telling the truth.
It would not work now. She was bleeding from a dozen places and covered in mud. Zeus’s eyes followed the litany of evidence down to the floor. When he saw how much of the swamp she had brought inside with her, how much Everglades earth was now on his carpet, his started to lose his composure.
