2028, p.15
2028, page 15
The sheriff took a slow pull from his glass of tequila as the few dozen from the defeated teams milled around before the bleachers. The sheriff nodded curtly at them. “You played well and gave us a good show. Even though you lost, you deserve a reward for trying.” He aimed his bullhorn toward the guard tower. “Go ahead, now.”
A shower of bullets from the guards’ AR-15s rained down upon the losing players as they scrambled about, sluggish from fatigue, to avoid being hit. The sound of the bursts of rounds were accentuated by loud gasps, cries, screams and a few cheers from the bleachers. Within a minute, half of defeated players lay dead, as some wounded crawled languidly and half-alive toward any sort of protection. Sheriff Jeff raised his hand, and the gun shots fell silent.
“That was fuckin’ TERRIFIC!” Saunders gushed.
“You wanna try, Stan?” From under his seat, the sheriff said produced a Soviet-made AK-47 with a white party bow tied to its stock. “My gift to you.”
“My god, Jeff, Really? God...damn!” he said as he took the automatic rifle from the sheriff and admired it.
“Safety’s off. All you gotta do is to step up to the fence, aim it through, and pull the trigger. Mind the kick...it’s a little rough on these Soviet models, but this one packs a hell of a lot of power.”
“Thanks!” Saunders gushed, then sprinted like a kid toward the fence with his new toy. He rested the slim barrel on the crook of a connection of two links, held the stock snug against his shoulder, squinted one eye to focus the other, then drew in his breath. He fired a burst at one of the crawling wounded as a test and shattered his leg. “Holee shit!” he muttered, then fired another short burst to finish him off. The vibration of the stock against the crook of his shoulder sent a reviving force through his body like a strike of lightning. This was just the sort of self-gratification and power he needed to feel after he’d been so eroded by his remembrance of the severed fingers and foot. He fired again and killed one of the Nicaraguans. “That’s one...One,” he said. Then he shot one of the Venezuelans in the back as he tried desperately to limp away. “That’s two...Two.” He turned and shouted back to Sheriff Jeff, who was beaming down at him from the platform above the bleachers. “This is fuckin’ great, Jeff! Thanks!”
The sheriff waved him back up. “Okay. Now y’all come on back up here an’ drink some more tequila with me, Commissar!” He waved another signal to the guards to finish off the rest of the defeated. The crowd looked on in horror, and in dumb amazement. The inmates looked vacantly at the carnage, seemingly as detached as zombies.
Once the court was bloodied and littered with dead, Sheriff Jeff called the victorious Mexican team forward. They reluctantly approached and stood, heads bowed, like a gathering of spindly gladiators before their Caesar. The sheriff congratulated them. He then ordered them to clean up the mess and bury the dead out in the desert; their reward for winning being that they hadn’t been executed.
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From the prisoner pen, the woman they called Diana had watched the whole incident in a catatonic state, as did the many others around her. She had been too worn down to feel anything, until she saw the PRICE Commissar take his shots, and then the guards beginning to finish off the rest. She spied her lieutenant in a guard tower with his rifle aimed down in her direction. Off to her left she saw an old Mexican woman trundle away in desperation toward the far end of the pen, only to be taken down by a shot in the back from the lieutenant’s rifle. She felt her skin bristle in a surge of hate; this rare sense of emotion igniting a dim realization of who she had once been—Tricia. She whispered her name: “Tricia.” The recognition urged on a resilience she’d held increasingly veiled through her years of abuse; years of conditioned silence when there was nothing worth saying.
She stood stoically in place, then turned to the one cringing next to her. Obviously a new arrival, he appeared still relatively hearty, having yet to suffer the starvation that time in the gulag would bring on. He didn’t look as indigenous as the others, but more like...her—light-skinned. She spoke in a ragged voice: “My name is Tricia.”
He glanced at her, his eyes glistening in tears. “Max,” he said nervously. “This fucking shit is all too familiar to me.”
“Fam...iliar?” she replied guardedly as if she was just learning to speak.
“A few months ago, in New York City.”
She had a fragmented memory of the place. She barely mouthed the words. “New York ...City?”
There was another burst of semi-automatic gunfire into the remains few scampering players on the court. “Shit!” Max shouted out. “God DAMN!”
“You...saw this...before?”
“Fuck! Yeah. This same shit happened to the Neo-Publicas at fuckin’ Kenton Tower.”
“Neo...?”
To avert his gaze from the carnage, he looked askance toward her. “Neo-Publica. The resisters...” He noticed her perplexed look. “To the fucking Kenton Regime.”
“Kenton?”
He hardened his gaze at her, probably thinking she was mentally challenged, or more likely brainwashed. “Yeah. Kenton. The Premier of Real-Amer— oh never mind,” he dismissed. A final burst of fire shattered the air, finishing the remaining defenseless soccer players. “Fuck!” he said as he swiftly turned away, “I’m getting the fuck outta here!”
“No!” She reached to grasp his sleeve. “No... don’t show them... your weakness.” She canted her head toward the old woman who’d tried to run but now lay dead. “They will...they will...shoot you...like her.”
“Why? How can these mother fuckers get away with that shit?”
“They shoot anyone...anyone...who tries to...run.” She felt his tension soften as he bowed his head to not look at what had just gone on. “You came here...when?”
“I don’t know...maybe a month ago? I don’t really remember.”
Tricia knew what he meant. The first loss an inmate sensed at Dalaxuma was time. There was nothing to relate it to. “Me? More than...two years, I think. Maybe...I can...help you. And maybe...maybe you can...help me.”
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Tricia spent the next week milling around the camp, while hoping for a chance encounter with Max. She wanted to know more about this resistance movement he’d mentioned just before they were herded back into the gulag complex by the BlueShirt guards. Her memory of her children had come slothfully back to plague her, along with the scant recollection of her identity. Maybe this Max, with his connection to that neo-resistance group he mentioned, could find out about them.
Max may have not been hard to locate as one of the few white skins among the scores of brown and black, but it was he who found her as she toted a bucket of sand from one part of the compound to another. It was just one more nonsensical duty, like the others which defined the gulag as a work camp.
“Hey, you. Tricia,” he called softly at her from where he hunkered near one of the men-worker’s barracks tents. He had already started to show the typical signs of wear: his soiled grey uniform; hoarse voice; work-worn hands; dry, heat-blistered skin; a developing “thousand-yard-stare” into nothingness—those beginning signs of no longer caring, even enough to care.
She looked down at him, then shyly away. “No. They call..call me...Diana, here.”
“Sit and talk with me?”
Conversation had become something foreign to her as she’d conditioned herself to suffer in silence over the last years. She glanced around to see if any BlueShirts were watching and saw them to be off in the distance. “Max...are you... alright?”
“What the fuck do you think?”
“No.”
“No,” he agreed. “Back home, a few months ago, I was an I.T. person at a bank.”
“I.T.?”
He shook off her query. “That doesn’t mean anything, anymore. Now all I do is rake sand out in the fuckin’ desert. What the fuck is that all about? It’s a big God-dammed desert.”
“That is what they...do.” She offered a forlorn smile, overturned her bucket, then sat on it. “I have to...carry sand. From over there...” She motioned in a general direction away, “to over there. I ...empty it out...then go back and fill it...do it again.”
“That’s stupid.”
She huffed a sigh meant to be a gentle laugh. “Stupid. Yes.” For a few moments they sat in silence, as though sharing a precious moment. “You said something ... about… Neo...Neo...?
“Neo-Publica. A resistance movement, yeah. But after what happened in New York, I doubt if it exists anymore.”
“No?”
“The Kenton Dictatorship. It’s too strong.”
There was that name again. “Kenton is...again?”
“An asshole. The guy who runs the country.”
She had another flash of recognition. “Yes. He is...an...asshole. Right?”
He smiled a little at the the ground. “That’s the least of it.”
“We need a resistance...here.”
“Good luck with that,” he scoffed.
“I am… nothing but a...” she looked down at her soiled bare feet. “A whore...to them. I...I don’t want to...want to...live anymore.” She gazed back up at him, feeling relief in the comfort at his returned look of concern. “But I don’t…want to...die, either.”
“What have they done to you, Tricia?” he whispered harshly.
“Diana.”
“Tricia,” he enforced. “That’s who you are, no matter what they call you, here. What have they done to you, hunh?”
She let out a ragged sigh and turned her back to him. She lifted her shift to reveal her whip-scars.
“Oh, fuck! Those sons of fucking bitches!” She let the hem of her shift fall back down. He must had surmised from the softness of her skin around the the scars, and something in her shy demeanor, that she probably hadn’t been plucked from the depravity of the streets to end up here. “What did you do to get thrown into this place? What were you before they put you in here?”
“What...was I?”
“Yeah. What did you do, before? Where were you from?”
“I have a hard time...remembering. My memories...They come and go. I was...married. I think. And I know I had…children ...Three, I think. When they...took me, they took...them. My children.”
“Took them?”
“To a place like...this. I can’t remember...where.”
“Fucking Kenton! Fucking PRICE!” he muttered.
“Yes...fucking Kenton and...fucking PRICE. Can you...can you help to...to get me out? Find my...children? Maybe do a Neo...Neo—?”
“Neo-Publica.”
“Yes. Neo-Publica...here?”
He smiled weakly. “No, Tricia.”
“Shh!” warned a nearby voice. “Not so loud!”
Max looked toward where the voice had come from, and vaguely recognized one of those who’d been arrested with him in New York. He was a darker-skinned, wiry man, older than him, maybe in his mid-thirties. “You were there, in New York, at the protest?”
“I was, and I would do it again. If I could. But no, not here.”
“No?” Tricia said, her tone now energized into a challenge. “Why not?...why not?”
He moved closer and hunkered down, forearms on knees. “Because there’s no Sylvia Morales here.”
“Shit, yeah,” Max remembered. “Man, she was great. I wonder if she got out?”
“Not that I saw. Even if she did, PRICE would have found her by now.”
“Sylvia...?”
“Yeah,” Max told her, “a leader with a vision.” He turned to the silhouette of the other man and squinted into the sun at him. “This is my friend, Tricia. And I’m Max Salerno.”
“I’m Sardo Garcia. You’re Italian? Your name sounds Italian.”
“It is,” Max said. “My family’s from, like the name says, Salerno.”
“And they put you in here? With all us other vaqueros?”
“What the fuck do they know? If your name ends with a vowel or a ‘z’, they probably figure you belong here. Did you know Sylvia?”
“By her speeches, and I did meet her once after one of them. Her boyfriend, a guy named Bob, introduced us.”
“Her speeches?” Tricia said. “What are they...are they about?”
“America,” Sardo told her. “What it was...what it could never be again.”
Max shook his head forlornly as he drew a finger through the sand. “It’s a lost cause, Tricia. There’s nothing here to start any resistance.”
She looked at Sardo. “Did you see what...what happened back then? The shootings...shootings in the soccer game?”
“Yeah,” he said dourly. “I did.” He glanced over at Max. “It’s worth a try.”
“What? A fuckin’ resistance? Sure. If you wanna get killed.”
Sardo waved his hand on the general direction of a cluster of emaciated Mexican inmates. “These are my people, Max, which makes them our people. We risked our lives in New York for a cause, and while we have our health, and some strength, we should try. Unless you wanna end up getting shot on the Sheriff’s tennis courts.”
Max considered his Sardo’s comment. “Are there any more of us from New York here?”
“I know about eight of us are.”
Max heaved a sigh. “Okay, Sardo, see if you can get them together. My tent is right here. We can talk about...whatever...tomorrow night after our portion of rice and beans.”
“Me too.”
“You too, Tricia.”
“Uh...we don’t have to,” Sardo said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, get together in your tent.”
“Why not?” Max said.
Sardo shifted his weight, then compiled his thoughts. He glanced around for any BlueShirts. “Do you shoot dice? Like, craps?”
Max cast him a sideways look. “I’m more of a blackjack fan, myself.”
“Well, I think you’ll like our craps game, Max. Some of us who came in from New York have been running a game two tents down every other night. Ya know? There’s a lot of strategy in craps. And we’ve, uh, added a lot of players over the last three weeks.”
Max picked up on his drift. “No shit?”
“Yeah. We’re way ahead of you. The stakes might get high. You want in?”
“Shit, yeah!”
Sardo looked up at Tricia. “Women are welcome in the game, too.”
“I...uh...I don’t play....dice games.”
“Yes, she does,” Max answered for her.
Be as discreet as though your ass hung on this, Max. Right?”
Max stared off at some inmates, then out toward the desert he and the others would be raking tomorrow. “Always.”
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August 4
The mechanic, Pepito, the trustee known among the dice players as Number 26—the second and fourth numbers of his seven-digit inmate number—squatted among them and watched Number 32 roll the makeshift dice. A two and a six. Number 88, the Nicaraguan with a crescent birthmark on his cheek, then rolled a seven. The other Nicaraguans in the group cheered as Number 88 gathered up the central pile of pebbles for himself.
Tricia stood behind the cluster of men and a few women bantering quietly away in Spanish, wondering what the sense of the game was. The pebbles won were nothing but a metaphor, like the game; yet perhaps one that took them all away from her for the few hours played. The seven former Neo-Pubs—as even she called them, now—from New York sat off to themselves and talked calmly in low tones of rebellion as if they were comparing Yankee batting averages.
She watched as Pepito turned his attention back to his whetstone to sharpen the point, then the edge of a metal shard. The discards from the abandoned pickup truck sitting outside the tent where he worked under guard on Zach’s Porsche had proved valuable as shanks. He held his handiwork up to the flickering lamplight, then rotated it like a treasure for one final inspection before he placed it in the pile with the dozen others he’d fashioned over the last few weeks.
Tricia turned her attention to Number 47, a swarthy Venezuelan, and a relatively new arrival. He manufactured smaller shanks from prongs taken from the rakes used to tend the desert. By looping the middle of the tine around a bunk post, he used a short bar and a pair of pilfered pliers to twist it around itself like yarn, then to a point. This was an arduous process, but Number 47 had once belonged to a street gang in Caracas, where they’d fashioned and used such weapons with ease. They were small, easily concealed, and, in the right hands, quick and lethal.
Her nostrils twitched at the stench wafting in through the barracks tent door, from where some stooges boiled up some yucca root to extract their juice. The juice would react with human bile to create a strong sedative, which, once inhaled went straight to the nervous system to immediately relax the body into near helplessness. The collection of bile might have been a problem, but in this case, not. When the victorious Mexican soccer team went out to bury the slaughtered Guatemalan, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan defeated in the desert three weeks before, they harvested the bile from their stomachs. This highly vicious yellowish-green substance was brought back to the indigenous Mayan spirit-healers to mix with the yucca root extract into the concoction the Mexicans called “Tonto Juice.” Strips of the dead’s clothing lay in small stacks near the cooking kettles, to later be soaked with the mixture.
