Dust Up: A Thriller (32 page)

I let go of the rope and tried to roll into the fall but got tangled in the rug. That’s probably what saved me.

By the time I hit the pavement, the rug was wrapped around me like a foul-smelling cocoon. The impact still hurt. A lot. But I didn’t break anything, I didn’t lose all my skin, and I didn’t even bang my head.

I hit once, bounced, and then rolled to a stop under the Jeep.

I lay there for a moment, unable to move and terrified that Toma was going to put the Jeep in reverse and back up to look for me. Instead, I felt hands grabbing my feet and dragging me out.

Toma smiled down at me, then started to scoop me up as if he was going to put me in the back of the Jeep like a swaddled baby. I tried to fight him off, but my arms were bound to my sides by the rug.

“No,” I barked. “Get me the fuck out of this.”

He huffed and glanced back down the block, then found the edge of the rug and pulled violently, spinning me out onto the street. He tossed the rug into the back of the Jeep and grabbed my shirt, pulling me to my feet.

We got into the Jeep and took off. We tore around the corner, then he looked at me and laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

He laughed again and pointed at me.
“Blan.”

79

When we got back to BBQ Central, Marcel was pacing in the alley out back. His face when he saw us was a mixture of relief and trepidation. I could understand if there was a part of him that had been hoping we couldn’t come back, or at least that we would come back empty-handed.

When I got out, he looked away, almost afraid, muttering an angry stream of Kreyol.

Toma walked up beside me, laughing. “He says you need to wash your face. You look like Baron Samedi, the voodou god.”

I walked away from the others and dusted myself off as best I could, trying not to breath in any of the Soyagene-X coming off me, wondering if I’d already ingested, inhaled, or absorbed enough to cause a reaction.

Elena came forward and led me through the back door, tutting and cooing as we passed through the small kitchen and into a tiny bathroom, where she got a damp cloth and wiped off my face and my arms, paying special attention to the scrapes that revealed themselves as she did. She left me in the bathroom to finish. I dunked my head under the faucet a few times, trying to rinse the stuff out of my sweaty hair before it turned to glue.

When I went back outside, Toma was leaning against Marcel’s van, looking on while Marcel and Elena mixed the Soyagene-X into the large sacks of Stoma-Grow cornmeal. They had bandannas tied around their faces to keep the dust out of their noses and mouths.

As they finished with each bag, they crumpled the top over, and Marcel put a strip of packing tape across it. I noticed that the rest of the bags were similarly taped and were already in the back of the van. The Soyagene-X bags were gone. Then I spotted them, empty, stuffed into a trash bag.

Marcel looked up at me and nodded.

Toma looked over as I approached. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

Marcel hoisted the last sack of mixed cornmeal and put it in the back of the van with the others. He slammed the door shut and pulled the bandanna down from his face. “Time to go.”

Elena’s face was drawn as she got into the van. I felt bad asking them to put themselves in this position.

Toma turned to me. “Let’s go.”

I grabbed him by the arm. “Ask them one more time—are they sure they want to do this?”

He walked up to the van’s driver-side window. Marcel lowered the window, and Toma spoke to them in Kreyol, hooking his thumb back in my direction. Marcel turned to Elena, sitting in the passenger seat. I could see her nodding in the darkness. Marcel turned back to Toma, then looked over at me and nodded too.

Toma turned to look at me. “Okay?”

We got in the Jeep and waited for Marcel to pull out, then followed after him. Toma drove.

The city was largely calm. The fires had mostly burned out, transformed into smoking piles of ash and rubble. The police were noticeably absent. Maybe they were already where we were going.

We made our way southwest through the city, taking a two-lane highway across Plaine-du-Nord, the Northern Plain. The moonlight shone on the scrub brush and farm fields. After a half hour, we passed through the small town of Limbe. It was quiet, and the streets were deserted.

Shortly after, we turned onto a much smaller road and started climbing into the low mountains. We passed a small dirt road that climbed steeply to our left, then we squeezed through a narrow, one-lane pass carved through the rocks.

Just on the other side of it, Marcel pulled off to the side of the road and waved for us to come up next to him.

As we did, we could see a massive encampment stretched out below us—hundreds of tents, dozens of trucks, even a helicopter—all illuminated by the pale moonlight.

Marcel leaned his head out the window. “That’s it. We’ll be okay. You should turn back.”

Toma leaned forward and looked around me at him, shaking his head, speaking in Kreyol. When he was done, he looked up at me and pointed over his shoulder at the hillside to our left. “I know this place. I told them we’ll be up on that hill, watching, in case something happens.”

I nodded. If something happened, we wouldn’t be in much of a position to do anything to help. But we’d try.

Elena leaned forward, talking around Marcel the way Toma had talked around me. She shook her head.

Toma sighed, then got out of the Jeep and ran around to her side of the van. They had a rapid back and forth, a lot of her shaking her head and him nodding. He kissed her on the cheek and ran back and got in the Jeep.

“I told her we’d be watching the entire time, and when they were done, we would follow them back to Cap-Haïtien.”

I barely knew the guy, but I felt somehow proud of him. He might have been an outlaw, but he had stepped up, and he was a good nephew. “Sounds good.”

Marcel eased forward, and the van disappeared over the rise.

Toma turned the Jeep around and doubled back through the narrow pass, then turned onto the steep dirt road that climbed the hill on the other side of it.

We wound our way up for a half mile or so. Toma killed the headlights and slowed to a crawl, driving by moonlight as the road curved onto a small plateau overlooking the valley below.

Below us, we could see the van’s headlights lighting up the road as Marcel and Elena headed toward the camp.

80

Toma raised the binoculars, following the van as it approached the camp. A spotlight lit up the night, and the van stopped in its tracks. I grabbed the binoculars as two soldiers with rifles approached them, one on either side.

Toma grabbed them back, and after a few tense seconds, he let out a loud breath and lowered them. The soldiers waved the van through.

I could kind of see what was going on, but Toma gave me a play-by-play as he watched through the binoculars. Marcel and Elena pulled up behind the tents, next to a clearing with some kind of green tanker trailer. As they unloaded the pots and other supplies from the truck, two sets of construction lights mounted on poles came on, drenching the area in a blue-white glare. Marcel lit a fire and started filling pots with steaming hot water from the tanker trailer. Elena set up the ingredients.

I looked at my watch. It was almost two
A.M.
I was relieved that I didn’t seem to be experiencing any respiratory symptoms from being coated in the Soyagene-X.

“We should each try to get some rest,” I said. “Why don’t you go first. I’ll keep an eye on things and wake you up in an hour.”

I wasn’t disappointed when he shook his head and said, “You go first. I’ll keep watch.” I didn’t argue, either.

I was exhausted, and I figured an hour of shut-eye would do me good. He gave me two, which was nice of him, but he looked like hell when he woke me up with an elbow and said, “Breakfast time,” shoving the binoculars into my hands.

Still half-asleep, I put them to my eyes. It was still dark, and my eyes were a little bleary, but I could see the soldiers lining up. In front of the line, Marcel and Elena stood next to two massive pots. An identical pair of pots sat over wood fires behind them.

Everyone stood motionless, waiting. Then Dominique Ducroix appeared, leading a small group of officers past the waiting soldiers to the front of the line. Marcel and Elena served them bowls of
mayi moulin
porridge.

Ducroix made a big deal of tasting his porridge, nodding and clapping Marcel on the shoulder. Apparently, it had passed the taste test. The officers turned and brought their breakfast back to a large tent in the middle of the camp, probably their command tent. Marcel and Elena began to serve the soldiers waiting in line.

The line of soldiers never seemed to go down. As the ones in front got their breakfast and moved off to eat it, more would appear out of the tent city. Every few minutes, Marcel stirred the pots on the fire behind them. After ten minutes, the first two pots were empty, and together Marcel and Elena switched them for the two that had been over the fires. As Elena started serving up again, Marcel filled the two empty pots with hot water from the tank, stirred in the ingredients, and placed them on the fire. Then he went back to helping Elena serve.

It was an impressive operation.

I turned to Toma. “You should get some sleep.”

He shook his head. I probably wouldn’t have, either. And I probably would have left me sleeping the way he had done too. I felt guilty about it, but there wasn’t much to be done. I offered him the binoculars back, but he shook his head and closed his eyes, resting them at least.

“Let’s change places, in case your change your mind.” He gave me an annoyed look, but then he let out a massive yawn and nodded his acquiescence.

I got in behind the wheel, and he got in the passenger side. In seconds, his breath was whistling through his nose in a precursor to snoring.

I watched as Marcel and Elena replenished the pots three times. After twenty-five minutes, the line finally started to dwindle. When it was almost down to nothing, the officers returned. I nudged Toma and handed him the binoculars. “Ducroix?”

He blinked a few times, trying to get his eyes to focus, then he looked through the binoculars. “That’s him.”

“He’s back for seconds.”

Toma kept the binoculars, and I let him. That was his aunt down there.

“Ducroix is talking to them,” he reported. “I don’t know what they’re saying … Now they’re walking away. There’s no one left in line … That’s it, then. I think they’re done.”

He handed me back the binoculars. Marcel and Elena were already breaking things down, rinsing out the pots with hot water from the truck, dumping it onto the ground, loading things into the van.

Behind them, the soldiers milled about in a different fashion than before. They were preparing for something. The first couple of tents started coming down, methodically dismantled. Vehicles were lining up.

I felt a momentary panic. What if the reaction didn’t happen in time? Maybe it took longer than I’d thought. Maybe I was still going to develop symptoms. What if it didn’t happen at all? What if we were wrong and the reason I wasn’t sick wasn’t because I’d avoided ingesting any of it but because the stuff wasn’t toxic, after all?

They had been serving for half an hour, at least. That meant a thirty-minute difference between when the first soldiers ate the porridge and the last ones.

Marcel and Elena seemed just about ready to go when a trio of soldiers walked up, the one in the middle hailing them. Something about their demeanor made me nervous. They seemed angry.

“There might be trouble.”

“What?” Toma asked, reaching for the binoculars. I swatted his hands away. “Hold on.”

Marcel shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He spoke for a moment, pointing back up the road they had driven in on, then shrugged again.

The soldier in front held up his finger, and he and his comrades turned and walked away, back to the large tent in the middle of the camp.

Marcel and Elena stood there obediently for a moment, their hands folded in front of them like chastised schoolchildren. They bent their heads toward each other, like they were whispering to each other. Then they turned and ran to the van. They got in and drove off in a hurry.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got trouble.”

81

Barreling down the hill as fast as I dared, I explained to Toma what I’d seen. “Hurry up then,” he said. “Step on it.”

His face was twisted with worry, and I was glad I was driving, because he would have been going faster, and the road was so bumpy and twisted we’d almost rolled over twice as it was. The sky was just beginning to lighten, and I was driving without headlights.

The road straightened as we approached the bottom, enough that we could see Marcel’s beat-up van flash by a hundred yards in front of us. We were closing on them fast, and Toma was still urging me to go faster, but I knew that if we were catching up with them, whoever was behind them would be too.

“Hold on,” I said to Toma, and as he did, I hit the brakes and screeched onto the road, facing back toward the camp, instead of following Marcel and Elena.

“What are you doing?” Toma demanded.

I gunned the engine, into the narrow pass, then slammed on the brakes, fishtailing so the single lane was completely blocked. I could see headlights coming up the hill toward us, and as soon as we came to a stop, I could hear a vehicle approaching.

“Get out,” I told Toma. “Take the rifle, get behind those rocks. If they look like they’re going to kill me, take them out if you think you can. Otherwise, just stay back. And if things don’t go well, hightail it back to Cap-Haïtien and make sure Marcel and Elena are okay.”

He nodded and ran off with the rifle.

I left the headlights on and opened the hood.

The engine sound grew louder, and seconds later, a Jeep just like ours flew over the rise, headlights blazing, skidding to a stop at an parallel angle to my Jeep.