The House of the Scorpion

by Nancy Farmer

  A few minutes later he heard Chacho land not far away. The mass shifted again, and Matt slipped down a few more feet. He felt a rib poke into his back. A fine dust of salt and sand pattered over his face. He heard Chacho cough. He heard the men’s feet crunch away and then the purr of the cart growing fainter and fainter until it was gone.

  “Are you okay?” called Chacho.

  “Depends on what you mean by okay.” Matt was amazed he could still laugh, although he did it weakly. “Are you hurt?”

  “Not much. Got any good escape plans?”

  “I’m working on it,” said Matt. The salt powdered his face and got into his mouth. “I wouldn’t mind a drink.”

  “Don’t talk about it!” said Chacho. “I think I could cut this tape if I could find a sharp bone.”

  “There’s one sticking into my back,” said Matt. He spoke cheerfully, as though they were working on a way to snatch an extra ten minutes of sleep, not trying to escape a long, painful death.

  “Some people have all the luck.” Chacho spoke lightly too, but Matt suspected he was just as frightened.

  Matt wriggled until his wrists touched the jagged bone. He sawed back and forth, but before he could make any progress, the bones shifted and he slid down into deeper darkness.

  “Matt!” cried Chacho with an edge of panic.

  “I’m here. Well, that didn’t work. Why don’t you give it a try?” In fact, Matt’s heart was pounding and he was afraid to move. The whole basin quivered, and he didn’t know what would happen if he fell all the way to the bottom.

  “Heck! Oh, heck!” shouted Chacho. Matt heard him slither through the fretwork of bones.

  “We’ve got all day. You don’t have to hurry,” said Matt.

  “Shut up! I think there’s something else in this pit.”

  Matt thought he heard a high-pitched noise. Was it possible something lived in the darkness below? And what kind of creature would choose such a home?

  “They’re bats! Horrible, slimy bats!” yelled Chacho.

  “Bats aren’t slimy,” Matt said, relieved. A real creature was much better than the monsters he’d imagined.

  “Stop making jokes! They’ll suck our blood!”

  “No, they won’t,” said Matt. “Tam Lin and I watched them dozens of times.”

  “They’ll wait for dark. I saw it in a movie. They’ll wait for dark and then they’ll come up and suck our blood.” Chacho’s panic was shrill and infectious. Matt began to get scared too.

  “Tam Lin says they’re just mice with wings. They’re as afraid of us as we are of—”

  “One’s coming at me!” screamed Chacho.

  “Keep still! Don’t move!” yelled Matt. A horrible idea had just occurred to him, and he had to warn Chacho before anything else happened.

  Chacho kept screaming, but he must have heard Matt’s advice because he didn’t struggle. After a moment his cries stopped and were replaced by sobbing.

  “Chacho!” called Matt. The boy didn’t answer. He wept on and on, hiccuping to catch his breath. Matt turned carefully, searching for another sharp bone. Below, in the ghostly near blackness, tiny bats fluttered and squeaked. They must have found the pit almost as comfortable as a cave. They flitted here and there, navigating between the bones like fish in a sea. A sour smell, disturbed by their wings, filtered up.

  “Chacho?” Matt called. “I’m here. The bats are settling down. I’m going to try to cut the tape again.”

  “We’ll never get out,” groaned Chacho.

  “Sure we will,” Matt said. “But we have to be very, very careful. We mustn’t fall down any farther.”

  “We’re going to die,” said Chacho. “If we try to climb out, the bones will shift. There’s tons of them here. We’ll fall to the bottom, and they’ll come down on top of us.”

  Matt said nothing. That was exactly the thought he’d had. For a few moments he was swept with despair, unable to think clearly. Was this the end to the chance at life he’d been given by Tam Lin and Celia? They’d never know what had happened to him. They’d think he had deserted them.

  “Tam Lin says rabbits give up when they’re caught by coyotes,” Matt said after he’d calmed enough to trust his voice. “He says they consent to die because they’re animals and can’t understand hope. But humans are different. They fight against death no matter how bad things seem, and sometimes, even when everything’s against them, they win.”

  “Yeah. About once in a million years,” said Chacho.

  “Twice in a million,” said Matt. “There’s two of us.”

  “You are one dumb bunny,” said Chacho, but he stopped crying.

  • • •

  As the sun slowly worked its way across the sky, Matt became more and more thirsty. He tried not to think about it, but he couldn’t help it. His tongue was glued to his mouth. His throat was gritty with sand.

  “I’ve found a sharp bone,” said Chacho. “I think it’s a tooth.”

  “Great,” said Matt, who was working his bonds against a rib. The tape had an amazing ability to stretch. He sawed and sawed, and the tape merely lengthened and didn’t break. But after a while it became loose enough for Matt to slip his hands free. “I did it!” he called.

  “Me too,” said Chacho. “I’m working on my feet.”

  For the first time Matt felt real hope. He drew his legs up carefully and picked at the bonds with a fragment of bone. It was horribly exhausting. He had to move extremely slowly to keep from sliding deeper, and he had to stop and rest every other minute. He realized he was growing weak.

  Chacho seemed to rest for longer periods too. “Who’s Tam Lin?” he asked during one of these breaks.

  “My father,” said Matt. This time he didn’t stumble over the words.

  “That’s funny, calling your parents by name.”

  “It’s what they wanted.”

  There was a long pause. Chacho said, “Are you really a zombie?”

  “No!” said Matt. “Do you think I could talk like this if I were?”

  “But you’ve seen them.”

  “Yes,” said Matt.

  The wind had died down, and the air felt heavy and still. The silence was eerie, because it felt like the desert was waiting for something to happen. Even the bats had stopped chittering.

  “Tell me about zombies,” said Chacho.

  So Matt described the brown-clad men and women who toiled endlessly over the fields and the gardeners who clipped the vast lawns of El Patrón’s estate with scissors. “We called them eejits,” he said.

  “It sounds like you were there a long time,” said Chacho.

  “All my life,” said Matt, deciding, for once, to be honest.

  “Were your parents . . . eejits?”

  “I guess you could call them slaves. A lot of work has to be done by people with normal intelligence.”

  Chacho sighed. “So my father could be okay. He was a musician. Did you have musicians there?”

  “Yes,” said Matt, thinking of Mr. Ortega. But Mr. Ortega couldn’t have been Chacho’s father. He’d been around too long.

  The sun was low in the west now. It was darker than Matt expected for this time of day, even with the light cut down by the pit. The breeze picked up again. It moaned like a lost spirit in the bones and turned surprisingly cold.

  “It sounds like La Llorona,” said Chacho.

  “That’s just a story,” said Matt.

  “My mother used to tell me about her, and my mother didn’t lie.” Chacho reacted instantly to any real or imagined insult to his mother. Matt knew she’d died when Chacho was six.

  “Okay. I’ll believe in La Llorona if you’ll believe the bats aren’t dangerous.”

  “I wish you hadn’t brought them up,” said Chacho. The wind blew even harder, sending a swirl of dust over the basin. The topmost bones rattled, and all at once Matt saw a blinding flash of light followed by a crack of thunder.

  “It’s a storm,” he said in wonder. The chill win
d pushed the smell of rain at him, making his thirst even more unbearable. Desert storms were rare, except in August and September, but they weren’t unheard of. They blew up suddenly, wreaked havoc, and vanished almost as quickly as they’d come. This one promised to be spectacular. The sky turned white and then peach-colored in the sunset light as a giant cloud loomed overhead. Lightning forked. Matt counted from flash to thunder, to gauge how far away it was: a mile, a half mile, a quarter, and then right on top of them. The bottom of the cloud opened, pouring out hailstones as big as cherries.

  “Catch them!” shouted Matt, but the roar of the storm was so loud, Chacho probably couldn’t hear. Matt caught them as they skittered down through the bones and crammed them into his mouth. They were followed by rain, buckets and buckets of rain. Matt opened his mouth and let it pour in. In the flashes of light he saw bats clinging to the bones. He heard water rushing over the side of the basin.

  And then it was gone. The thunder retreated across the desert. The lightning grew fainter, but water still poured into the pit. Matt bunched up his shirt and sucked out as much moisture as he could. The rain had revived him, but he hadn’t gotten nearly as much water as he wanted.

  The sky was almost dark now. “Aim yourself at the nearest edge while you can still see,” Matt called to Chacho. “My legs are free. Are yours?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “Are you okay?” Matt had the awful thought that Chacho had slipped to the bottom during the violent storm. “Chacho! Answer me!”

  “The bats,” said the boy in a hollow voice. He was still nearby. Matt felt a rush of relief.

  “They won’t hurt you,” he said.

  “They’re all over me,” said Chacho in that odd voice.

  “Me too.” Matt suddenly became aware of the little creatures creeping onto his body. “They—they’re trying to get away from the water,” he stammered, hoping it was true. “Their nesting place is flooded. And I guess they want to get warm.”

  “They’re waiting for it to be dark,” Chacho said, “and then they’ll drink our blood.”

  “Don’t be a complete idiot!” shouted Matt. “They’re frightened and they’re cold!” All the same, he felt an instinctive horror at their stealthy movements. A distant flash of lightning showed him a tiny creature huddled against his chest. It had a flat nose and leaflike ears, and its mouth disclosed delicate, needle-sharp teeth. But it also had a baby tucked under one leathery wing. It was a mother trying to rescue her young from the flood.

  “You wouldn’t bite me, would you?” he whispered to the mother bat. He turned slowly, freezing in place when the bones threatened to shift, then moving again, aiming toward where he thought the nearest edge lay. The bat clung briefly to his shirt before sliding off into the darkness.

  It was like being a swimmer in a strange and terrible sea. Every time Matt moved forward, he sank down a little. At one point the bones weighed upon his back and he feared they had trapped him. But they shifted slightly and allowed him to move on. Yet every stroke toward shore increased their weight. Soon he would be unable to move, and then he would have to wait, like a bug imprisoned in amber, for death to find him.

  The pit was completely black when his hands struck against rock instead of bone. Matt grasped the wall and inched himself upward until he was able to plant his feet against the stone. Now the bones seemed even heavier, but that was because he was trying to force his way up through them. He leaned against the rock, panting with exhaustion. He found a trickle of storm water still flowing and lapped it like a dog. It was cold and mineral. It tasted wonderful.

  “Chacho?” he called. “If you come toward my voice, you’ll reach the edge. There’s water.” But the boy didn’t answer. “I’ll keep talking, so you’ll know where to go,” said Matt. He talked about his childhood, leaving out things that would be hard to explain. He described Celia’s apartment and his trips into the mountains with Tam Lin. He described the eejit pens and the opium fields that surrounded them. Matt didn’t know whether Chacho could hear him. The boy might have fainted. Or the bats really might have drunk his blood.

  It was the middle of the night when Matt pulled himself over the edge and collapsed onto wet earth. He was unable to move. All the willpower he’d used to work his way free deserted him. He lay on his side with his face half in mud. He couldn’t have moved if Jorge had shown up with an army of Keepers.

  As he drifted in and out of consciousness, he heard a strange sound coming from the pit. Matt listened, trying to decide what animal made such a noise, and then it came to him: Chacho was snoring. The boy had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. He might still be trapped in the pit, but he was alive. And the bats hadn’t drunk his blood after all.

  34

  THE SHRIMP HARVESTER

  The sky was dark blue and the mud bore a powdering of frost when Matt pulled himself from the ground. He crouched to protect what little warmth his body produced. A wind ruffled the little pools of water that dotted the desert. The east was a blaze of pink and yellow.

  Matt had never been so cold in his life. His teeth chattered; his body felt like one giant goose bump. In the growing light he saw that his clothes had been torn in a dozen places during his journey through the pit. His arms and legs were covered with scratches. He hadn’t noticed the injuries during the desperate fight to survive, but now he hurt all over.

  “Chacho?” he called to the sea of bones turning gray in the predawn light. “Chacho!” Matt’s voice was carried off by the breeze. “I’m outside. I’m safe. You can be too. Just come toward my voice.”

  No answer.

  “You’ll go down a little, but after a while you’ll come to the edge of the pit. I can help you then,” called Matt.

  No answer.

  Matt paced back and forth along the edge of the basin. He had a fair idea where Chacho was, but he couldn’t see him. “There’s water out here from the storm. I can’t get it to you, but you can come to it. It’ll make you feel a lot better. Please, Chacho! Don’t give up!”

  But the boy made no reply. Matt found a rain-filled hollow in a rock and drank until his head stabbed with pain. The water was freezingly cold. He went back to the edge of the basin, calling, begging, and even insulting Chacho to get a response. There was nothing.

  As the sun came over the rim of the desert and light flooded the little hillocks and bushes all around, Matt curled up in the shelter of a rock and cried. He couldn’t think of a thing to do. Chacho was out there, but he couldn’t find him. Even if he did find him, Matt couldn’t go to him. And there weren’t any plants in the desert that would make a decent rope.

  Matt wept until he was exhausted, which didn’t take long because he was tired already. The sunlight brought a slight warmth to the air, although the wind whipped it away the minute Matt stood up.

  What could he do? Where could he go? He couldn’t stay here until Jorge came back to check up on things. But he couldn’t leave Chacho behind, either. He limped back to the basin and sat on the edge. He talked and talked, sometimes exhorting Chacho to come toward his voice, sometimes only rambling on about his childhood.

  He talked about El Patrón and the fantastic birthday parties. He talked about María and Furball. He talked until his throat was raw, but he didn’t stop because he felt this was the only rope he could throw Chacho. If Chacho could hear him, he wouldn’t feel completely alone and he might try to stay alive.

  The sun rose high enough to shine into the pit. Matt saw, not far down, a patch of brown. It was the uniform all the boys wore in the factory. “I can see you, Chacho,” said Matt. “You aren’t far from the edge. You can make it if you try.”

  In the distance he heard a clanking, mechanical noise. It wasn’t Jorge’s cart, but perhaps the Keeper had borrowed something sturdier. Matt shaded his eyes. He wanted to hide, but he saw with dismay that he’d left muddy footprints all over the ground. He couldn’t possibly wipe them out before someone arrived.

  He waited hopelessly
for the Keeper to find him, but instead, to his amazement, he saw Ton-Ton’s shrimp harvester shuddering and groaning over the desert. Fidelito sat on the hood. As soon as he saw Matt, he jumped off and started running.

  “Matt! Matt!” shrieked the little boy. “You got out! Where’s Chacho?” He flung himself at Matt and almost knocked him over. “I’m so happy! You’re alive! I was so worried!” Matt held on to him, to keep him from dancing over the edge of the basin.

  The shrimp harvester jerked to a stop. “I, uh, I thought you might need help,” said Ton-Ton.

  Matt began to laugh. Only it wasn’t a laugh, more like hysteria. “Need help?” he wheezed out. “I guess you could say that.”

  “I did say it,” said Ton-Ton, looking puzzled.

  Matt began to shiver. His laughter turned into stormy weeping. “Don’t do that!” wailed Fidelito.

  “It’s Chacho,” sobbed Matt. “He’s in the bones. He won’t talk. I think he’s dead.”

  “Where?” said Ton-Ton. Matt pointed out the brown uniform, all the while clutching Fidelito’s arm. He was terrified the little boy would fall into the pit.

  Ton-Ton positioned the harvester at the edge. He reached into the bones with the mechanical arm he used to tip shrimp tanks into his collecting bin. At the end was a large claw. Slowly, methodically, Ton-Ton cleared away the top layer until they could see Chacho’s face. The boy’s eyes were closed. Ton-Ton moved away more bones until Chacho’s chest appeared. The cloth was torn and his uniform was streaked with blood, but he was breathing.

  “It’d work better if he could, uh, help,” said Ton-Ton. He maneuvered the machine as delicately as a surgeon performing an operation.

  “Could I climb out on the arm and tie a rope around him?” Matt had stopped crying, but he couldn’t seem to stop shivering.