This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1) (6 page)

             
Chapter 15

Big Early bites down. 

The pain is enough almost enough to dissolve the sudden rush in my chest.  To dissolve my questions.  As he chews, growling, I can sense the pitiful thing searching my face for forgiveness.  I lower my eyebrows with some effort.  Relaxed.  I think of nothing and breathe until my countenance is a calm sheet of ambiguity.

Gotta put on a brave face for the poor thing, I think.  Because, fuck, these things are in there deep, that’s why.  No sense being optimistic either, making him think this shit’s going to be alright. 

Got some work ahead of me. 

I grunt as Early falls over, flopping in pain.  Some time passes, I have no idea how much. All I can say is that it is later, and occasionally, I pet him, feeling myself being carried away by the fear that helping him is going to kill him.  Sometimes I watch blearily as the blood pours out of his mouth. Pitiful, pitiful.  It takes a couple forevers and I’m nowhere near done. It’s like I’m trapped in some kind of upper room of my mind, the only way out is a mile of torture for him.  Death along for the ordeal, and I remember things, dream things, quill after quill, as I pull them out. Even in this cold, black bend of consciousness, fearful and trying not give a shit all at once, my mind wanders, but I keep my face calm. Maybe after we get this shit out of his mouth, he’ll live, or howl and run off, but that’s a big damn maybe.

Sure isn’t happening yet.

***

In the morning it’s done. 

And he’s not dead yet. 

There is no epiphany or thanks.  Just a dog named Early, asleep with his head on my ankle.  I pet at the wet tendrils and think, this dog needs a beer, to wash his face in, if nothing else.

I pour some water out for him to frink.

Early looks up, scoots away. 

He is lying a few feet away from me, breathing heavy.  He looks at me, then looks away.  He seems to consider something.  Gets up again and walks a few more feet away.  He does a few turns and returns to his belly, eyeballing me as I approach. 

I feel stupid for petting his sore mouth.  It was probably a mistake to think he would appreciate what I was doing.  More than probably.   He walks off into the bush without looking back at me.

I catch up with more than just a little effort.

My best friend back home, besides Emily, is Doc.  Hard to explain why.  Friendship at first sight kind of thing.  My uncles, all five of the cantankerous old bastards, love him as much as I do, which makes it better, somehow.

And finally, I see this dog waiting for me, and I feel something close same thing.  Love at third or fourth sight will have to do.

             
Chapter 16

We just walk.

There’s two of us now.  Better than one, bet your ass.  We move to higher ground, get out of the brush somewhat, and Early doesn’t lead or follow.  As it should be.  He just looks at me like if I ever pull anything out of him again there’s going to be some bigtime flesh getting ripped out someone.

We halt atop a gorge, on a rocky and thin trail, where we stop to take a light meal of jerky and biscuits.  The dog, I shit you not, chews his food more than I do.  He sits his dusty butt on a rock, a mottled tongue draping his lower canines after he finally swallows. 

I’m dizzy again.  Thirsty and sore all over.  No telling how Early feels.  Swollen goofball face still.

We don’t complain to each other about it. 

He looks off and growls.

Get my binoculars, chewing.  A pack of the undead crouch at the edge of the field below.  Loud sons of bitches.  Maybe it’s the rocky cliffs at our back.  They are after some prey, far beneath us.  A pack of nine, they scamper up a rocky hillside, their yelps rising like distant hawk screeches as they reached an ivy-etched pole of some sort.  Here, they overtake a small troop of monkeys, whose own screeches rival theirs.  The dog shifts his weight and gives a low, disapproving noise. 

Catch myself half-laughing as I put the binoculars in front of the dog’s eyes.

“Nasty fuckers, aren’t they?”

The fierce German Shepherd licks my thumb and looks up at me for a biscuit. 

I again glass the far hillside without giving in to his request. Early gives me a playful bite as the pack settles in, some disappearing to the ground with the unskinned, ungutted meat they carried.  Others sniff each other and take dominant or submissive positions in the flattened weeds around the nest.

That semblance of culture.  It could be a weakness if it was consistent.  But they’re not like wolves or chimps.

I could take them out.  Not a problem.  It’s not bragging to say I am absurdly accurate with a rifle.   Best shot you know.  Comes from focus.  Pathological focus.  My aunt, Slutty Gene, told me my focus was a curse, placed on me at my conception, because my parents had screwed in the fog.

I resist a shiver. 

It’s not the thought of mom and dad screwing.  It’s Gene.  She went through soldiers like tampons.  But it’s not exactly that either.  Prostitution had not made her an unkind woman.  Just weird, I used to think.  Nothing typical about her.  I quiver to think that she came to live with us a while, busted me jerking off once and didn’t flinch.  We’re not talking mid-stride.  I mean puckered lips and bared teeth and eyes rolling back. 

Gene just shut the door.  She waited a second or two and told me to holler when I was done on the toilet. 

I felt beneath her for years.  Seeing her take it on a pool table in front of crowd didn’t change that.  She was a good woman.

I don’t think about her much.  Yet.

That’ll come.

***

We get going, following the sounds of distant Shado. I start to smell that muddy fish smell unique to the rivers around here.  You can feel the odors. Like a warmth.  I hear the water running now.

We start dropping down toward the smell and feel and sound of a river but I can’t see it yet.  I feel like we’re on top of it when we start going back uphill again.  We get up a little rise and the last bit of daylight cataracts across some water and I see it’s a swift little river.  Several flat bottom, aluminum boats protrude, half hidden, from a vine-strewn tin shed.  

I’m blessing the boats and looking at Early and asking him if he knows what this means. 

He’s right, not much.  I feel a little better though.  A river will lead us to the coast, and it feels better to have something to follow. Plus there’s the smell of water and the bit of noon sun poking through the clouds, and the tiniest spark of something like hope has me strip-club giddy all the sudden, and we dare to climb down in the shallow edge of the surprisingly cool water. 

Running over my ankles is all it takes to cool me off.  Early is drinking the hell out of it.   Then, me too.  It’s stupid to drink it unfiltered, but delicious.  We’re looking up as we’re drinking, all around, in case shado come at us while we have our faces stuck in the water. I realize we’re a pack, Early and me, because he’s watching when I’m not, and vice versa, for someone coming for the boats or emerging from the little shed.  

Water is dripping down our chins.  I was far, far thirstier than I realized.  In a quarter hour he and I have drunk much and seen no one.  We move slow, full of life now, and come down the water’s long curve.

No one in the shed.  I’m looking at a sharper bend where there are rocks.  No one.  It looks like we might get a boat without a fight.  Impossible, I know, so I bring the M4 to my eye.  My heart instinctively slows.  Breathing steadily, looking down a winding, crumbling snake of a river. It slides to the left, downhill, to an old building with nine or ten lumps of vine that probably had cars underneath.

No death’s head faces looking at us.  No people.  No glare from a scope.  When Early gives the all clear with a kiss on my hand, and I lower the gun.  Swallow. 

Just plain luck.

Sometimes that’s what it boils down to.  That, and one other thing.  I cluck my tongue, and me and Early are climbing in a boat.  The side of it says Basstracker.

There’s oars. A tank full of gas.  Storage compartments full of saltines and canned meat.  A full complement of bottled water.  We stay looking and watchful before we dare to start it up, the sun ever lowering, the dark closing in.  It starts on the fourth try. 

Early and I set out.  Turn off the engine. 

Always looking.

Time and jungle, passing slowly.

Darker now.

Drift sluggishly, ever so slowly down river.  The sky is mostly open to the stars and Early is looking up at them occasionally as if a matter of scientific curiosity.

We encounter nothing.  No one.  No resistance, no price.  Just going without having to walk, on my ass, until I’m seeing the ocean.  The ocean so soon.

It’s the opposite of my jungle-dreams.  A pleasant dream of taking a nap and waking rested with the dawning of the next day; a dream of watching my buddy bark at a dolphin and look at me to make sure I saw it too.  It is a moment, and it is something cosmic, more profound than the first time you watched your girlfriend praying.

The rapture of heading home, somehow still alive.

And feeling okay.

             
Chapter 17

The joyously sad din of human contact comes ten days later, once I’m finally myself, finally, slowly, Tyler McCarthy again.  Tyler McCarthy and Big Early.  Sniper.  Dog.  We are further up the coast, in a sheltered bay.  The water is a vast, undulating gem.  The walls of a city rise before us, perched up on a grassy hill.  300 yards away.  Up curls a little path, sown like a stitch in the fabric of grasses, up into the cluster of buildings.  Looks as though some child-like force has glued together the fragments of two dozen apartment buildings.  Shipping containers.  Barbed wire on the walls.  Good doses of voice and laughter rise and ebb.

I have come to a certain amount of muscle in life, but places like South America, the body always feels low on fuel.  The coastal wind blows it away probably.  I pull the boat between two massive trees that have fallen into the bay, instantly breathy.  The air is muggier than usual for so late in the day, thicker now with smoke from some manner of meat. 

This great, patient dog below me, I perch myself high up and soak in the layout.  Can’t see much.  I creep a little higher, slowly, confidently.  The paws some forty feet under my combat boots beneath make a brief attempt to climb too, almost with a pensive humor about him, and I grunt and turn back to the city.

No traffic in or out.

I turn back to Early.  This is the real test, I think.  Whether we’ll manage our way back—the way he act when I’m scouting.

He’s my spotter.

Wagging his tail about something, maybe the meat smell, I believe he’ll do fine.  I pull the sweaty helmet from my head and watch the dog another moment and climb even higher.  Get the binos.  Look out between two branches into the gathering afternoon rains.

The tiny city-compound has a feel to it.  This is not a safe place.  Armed compounds aren’t particularly unusual.  But in Central America it’s an art.  Has been, even before the outbreak.  Given the often bloody manner in which the
narco-trafficantes
settled their disputes, along with the ever-present danger of kidnapping for the wealthy and their families, Central Americans had grown skilled in making them blend into the zeitgeist of the local culture.  They arrange the presence of armed gunmen the way Japanese placed rocks in a garden.  Almost a thing of beauty.  But not arrogantly so.  Walk by one, give them a salute or a wave, and they will always reciprocate.  You could live by one for decades and not ever hear an altercation or even sense any problems.  Social camouflage, so to speak.  Not here.  Something is off.  Sinister.  I cannot understand why or how I know until I see three naked women travel down a road that narrows to nothing, just a thin squeezeway between five stories of shipping container homes.  Doomed.  You can see it.  Children stare down at them.  Anemic cherubs.  The other adults are looking away.

They are not being led, which somehow feels more tragic.  At a remarkably intact floral shop, the woman step, slower now, to the nice brickwork and steel to a sudden maw in the earth, and plunge to their knees.  Their chests are flat against the ground, kind of have their upturned asses facing me at an angle.  A sticky, aching sort of sobriety washes over me when a fat man emerges from the ground, his bald head painted or tattooed blue.  The soldier in me grips the M4.  I count my breaths when I see he has a bullwhip.  

He looks them over.  Walks around them.  No one else nearby.  His back to me, he makes them put their hands behind their head, teeth in the dust, then walks behind them and kicks at their inner thighs, making them spread their legs somewhat.  Their faces are practically buried now. 

Then their backs and the cracks of their asses are spurted with the fatty blood of the man’s brains. 

Because I didn’t like the fucking looks of him, that’s why. 

Chinga tu madra, puto. 

And fuck the fallout too. 

As I climb down, I don’t have to tell Early to join me in the boat.  He’s more than just a dog.  In the field, a good one’ll make you understand that.