After America (4 page)

Sofia, shaky and fearful, reached him from behind.

“What is going on, Papa?”

“Stay where you are, Sofia,” he said harshly. His throat had clamped tight and did not want to work.

Screams drifted up from the hacienda: a woman’s howl, his own woman. Mariela Pieraro. She screamed in her native tongue, lashing at her tormentors, who all appeared to be gringos, although most of them were so filthy that it was hard to be certain.

Road agents
, he thought, the very words like a rattlesnake in his mind. A collection of vaquero pretenders, costumed in a motley collection of army camouflage, urban gangbanger, and cowboy fetish outfits. They ran like vermin all over the outer wastes of the Texas Republic, but Miguel had never known them to venture so far into the Federal Mandate. That was why he had brought his family to settle here, so they would be safe. His head swam and squirmed with horrified rage as he realized how wrong he had been about that. He had led them all here, and now they were dying for it. His hands were shaking so badly, he could hardly make out the scene below. A hard mercy in a sense, because at that moment three men were attacking his wife.

Just a few seconds’ exposure to the atrocity was more than enough for Miguel. He could no more stand to watch the unfolding horror than he could have perpetrated it himself. He let the binoculars fall and tried to push himself up from his prone position hidden in the lush greensward on top of the ridge overlooking his family home. His stomach heaved as he did so, and he dry retched, stumbling badly as he turned to hurry down the hill to his daughter.

Perhaps his only surviving child now.

Teetering and almost falling down the slope on legs as stiff and unyielding as a tin soldier’s, the cowboy almost knocked over his oldest girl, so blinded was he by the shock.

“Father? Papa?”

He took the reins from Sofia with violently trembling hands and somehow pulled himself up into the saddle. Maybe someone had managed to get away, or perhaps some of the gunshots were from the survivors, trying to fight the agents off. He could ride down there, perhaps help out. Maybe give the survivors a chance to fight back, even the odds.

Maybe, just maybe …

“What is it? Father, Papa, tell me,” she pleaded in a small voice cracking with panic. She, too, could hear the gunfire and screams coming over the ridgeline.

Miguel unholstered his Winchester, feeling its deadly promise in his shaking hands. It was too late, far far too late to save his loved ones, but high time indeed for a reckoning with those who had taken their lives.

Maybe
...

He checked the load and slid the rifle back into the saddle holster. With a tap of his heels, his mare began to crest the hill. Sofia mounted her animal and followed suit. “I’m coming with you,” she cried out to him in strangled English

Miguel shook his head fiercely. “No, you are too headstrong for your own good. Stay here. I will—”

The boom of a large-bore weapon rolled over the crest like a single note of distant thunder. He turned quickly in the saddle, pulling the binoculars up to his eyes so quickly that he smacked himself in the face. His wife’s body was slumping to the floor of the wide veranda that ran around the hacienda, leaving a dark smear on the whitewashed wall. One of the rapists spit at her, as she lay on the ground.

A small sound escaped from Miguel’s lips, something between a groan and a strangled squeak. His vision grayed out to the edge, and dark blossoms of poison night flowers bloomed in front of him. He swayed and very nearly passed out.

The guns fell quiet and silence filled the atmosphere, broken only by the cackles and shouts of the road agents. He scanned the landscape for some forlorn hope that one of his sons or Mariela’s brothers had made it to cover, waiting with their own weapons to back him.

Sofia was suddenly by his side. She took the binoculars from him and surveyed the scene herself.

“No,” she whispered. “No, please.”

“It changes nothing,” Miguel hissed, his head clearing. “Wait here.”

Sofia reached over and took the reins of her father’s horse in her hand. He turned on her with a look that caused her to flinch away. She drew back a bit but did not drop the reins, however, keeping them firmly in her hands.

“Sofia.” His tone was low and even. “Give me the reins.”

“No, Papa, please. Don’t leave me up here alone. Don’t go down there. They will kill you, and I will have no one.”

His daughter’s face, a contorted mess of terror and pain, began blurring and running in front of him as tears filled his eyes. Miguel had trouble speaking. “Sofia, you may think you are too old for a whipping,” he choked out, “but I will give you one if you do not hand me the reins.”

“I will gladly suffer that if it keeps you alive,” she said.
“Pleeease.”

Miguel felt as though he might die. Whole continents of loss, huge tectonic slabs of grief and rage, were breaking up and grinding around inside his body. It was entirely possible, that his heart might explode. Through it all only one thing grounded him and kept him tethered to reality: Sofia’s small pale hand gripping his arm, stopping him from rushing headlong into violence and annihilation.

As tremors racked his upper body, she stood in the saddle and examined the property with his binoculars. Engines turned over amid shouts of pleasure and curses of aggravation. A few random shots pierced the air, but none in their direction.

“They are leaving,” Sofia said. “They have not seen us.”

Miguel reached for the binoculars, causing Sofia to pull back farther, taking Miguel’s horse with her.

“Please,” Miguel said. “The binoculars.” He did not wish her to see any more.

She handed them over.

The road agents pulled away from the hacienda, taking a few potshots at the windows. One of the vehicles stopped by the chicken coop. It was a faded sky-blue Ford F-150, an older model, rusty in places and in need of a muffler. A driver remained at the wheel while the other men went for the chickens. The birds, already spooked by the gunfire and screaming, took fright and scattered in all directions as the main body of the agents’ convoy rounded a bend in the road and disappeared from sight. The stragglers made no move to join them. Instead, the driver of the truck climbed out of the cabin to join his comrades in chasing the chickens. He was carrying a small cooler, from which he took a can of beer.

Miguel’s eyes narrowed.

Three to one was much better odds than twenty to one, he thought silently. This would be a start.

“Here.” He tossed the binoculars at his daughter’s face. “Catch.”

He heard her yelp as he swiped the reins from her hands and rode off.

“Stay here,” he ordered, from the crest of the hill. “I mean it, Sofia. I will call you down when it is safe.”

He didn’t look to see if she obeyed. The lack of hoofbeats behind him told him she was staying in place. Miguel drew his Winchester again and levered a round into the breach. The reins he laid lightly in his lap, controlling the horse with his knees and occasional shifts of body weight. This was not Hollywood. He did not charge down the slope or scream his vengeance to the skies. He rode slowly at first, increasing his pace to a canter as he drew within range. The three road agents were entirely distracted attempting to round up his chickens, presumably for their lunch or dinner. They were even laughing at their own haplessness and incompetence. The moronic sound of it drifted uphill toward him.

The awful scenes of murder and violation that assailed him on all sides, he ignored. Or rather, he simply shut down any human reaction to them, letting a crust of dried blood as hard as an iron carapace form around his heart. An easterly breeze blew the smell of spilled blood and corruption into his face, carrying with it the harsh laughter of three of the men who had destroyed his family. He could tell now they were drunk, staggeringly so. As his horse pulled up in a clatter of iron-shod hooves on hard-packed dirt, one of them, the driver, finally noticed him. A look of dumb incomprehension clouded his bovine features as Miguel dismounted. He half smiled, half waved before finally raising his beer can to take a sip.

The driver was at least a hundred yards away, and two bodies lay between him and Miguel, one of them the cowboy’s son. The other looked like old Armando, Mariela’s uncle. A swollen river of black hatred poured through Miguel’s head.

“Hola,”
the road agent slurred.
“?Como estas?”

Miguel lifted the rifle mechanically and shot the road agent in the forehead. The beer can from which he was drinking exploded fractionally before his head flew apart and his body tumbled over backward.

“Hey!”

“What the fuck?”

The other two had noticed his presence at last. The man farthest away, a fat stringy-haired gringo in blue jeans, circus cowboy chaps, and a long leather jacket, had actually managed to grab one chicken. He at least had the presence of mind to drop the bird and try to retrieve the assault rifle hanging from his shoulder, but Miguel gutshot him before he was able to lay a hand on the weapon. He screamed and fell to the ground, his body shuddering under the impact of two more bullets.

The last intruder turned tail and ran for the truck. Whether he was going for his guns or attempting to escape, Miguel did not know. He tracked the running target for two seconds before shooting him in the hip. The man went down like a galloping horse that had snapped a leg in a gopher hole. His screams were pitiable, animalistic. Miguel chambered another round and advanced on him without mercy. He was a scrawny specimen, although possessed of a potbelly he had tended well over the years. Like his friends, he was dressed in an eccentric combination of Wild West castoffs and modern hoodlum chic. As he scrabbled through the dirt, still trying to reach the sanctuary of the pickup truck, he kept one clawlike hand clamped on his ruined hip, from which geysered thick dark gouts of arterial blood keeping time with his failing heartbeat.

Miguel ground his teeth together so painfully that he thought they might shatter as he stalked past the body of his son. Every good and decent instinct in his body was drawing him toward the little boy, urging him to scoop up his body gently as though he were just sleeping and might be revived by a father’s kiss upon his eyelids. But Miguel knew from a brief horrified glimpse at his wounds that his only son was gone. He squeezed off any good or decent feelings that might have remained in his heart as though he were crushing a small bird within his fist.

He was just dimly aware of one small surviving voice of rationality, a mere whisper in the chorus of rage and loathing that filled his mind. It was his own voice, speaking from a better time, telling him he had no choice but to preserve the life of this man in front of him no matter how wretched a creature he might be, because he needed to know who had done this and why. But a hot gust of intemperate hatred blew that small, reasonable voice away. With his face distorted in a rictus of pain and malice, he very carefully and slowly walked up to the whimpering, moaning creature attempting to escape from him. When he was in range, one swift boot into the rib cage flipped the man over, causing him to cry out anew. Miguel raised his knee and stamped down viciously with the heel of his boot on the man’s face, muffling his scream of protest and agony. Again he stomped down, shattering a mouthful of teeth and shredding lips and cheeks.

Stomp.

Stomp.

Stomp.

By the time he was finished, by the time the demon that had arisen inside his head and apparently taken over his body was finished, Miguel’s leg ached. His boots and jeans were soaked with blood and smeared with gobs of brain and bone chips. The road agent’s head was no more than a gruesome pancake. A cold wind seemed to pass through him, and he collapsed to the earth, shivering.

Wiltshire, England

Caitlin awoke to the crying of her baby. The child would be hungry and in need of changing, and today was Bret’s morning off, which sounded a lot more indulgent than it really was. He might get to hide under the covers for a few minutes more while she tended to little Monique and brought the coal-fired stove back to life for coffee. It was a good idea to keep the fuel banked up overnight and never to let the stove go out completely. Not unless you felt like flapping around before dawn with a cold draft blowing up your nightdress as you got down on all fours to jam rolled-up paper and fresh coal into a dead hearth. Caitlin tried to rub another night of broken sleep from her eyes and squinted at the glowing dial of her watch. Looked like about oh-four-hundred-twenty hours. “Omigod-thirty,” as Bret referred to anytime before the sun rose. She swung her long, finely muscled legs over the side of the lumpy mattress and dropped in bare feet to the flagstone floor. A fair drop, too. The antique wrought-iron bed was huge.

“Want me to get her?” Bret mumbled without much enthusiasm from under the duck feather duvet. Summer was not far off, but the weather had been chilly since the Disappearance, and although it did seem to be returning to normal, they still often slept under a couple of layers of woolen blankets and one oversized quilt.

“Not unless you can grow a pair of working udders in the next three minutes,” Caitlin croaked, aware of just how swollen and heavy with milk her breasts were again. Monique was a good sleeper mostly, for which they were profoundly grateful, but that meant that Caitlin woke up most mornings needing to get her on for a long feed. Bret’s half snort, half snore told her just how sincere the offer had been.

She wearily worked her feet into a pair of slippers and padded through into the baby’s room, ducking under the low wooden lintel. At least he’d offered, and if she had genuinely been too tired to deal this morning, he would have dragged himself into the nursery to change the diaper before sliding Monique into bed beside Caitlin for a feed and a cuddle. They had all fallen asleep like that more than once.

The baby’s cries, which had been short, disjointed, and scratchy when she first awoke, were growing longer and more insistent as she realized she was both hungry and trapped inside a large, wet, and very unpleasant square of not-so-white toweling cloth. Disposable diapers were almost impossible to get now, and as Caitlin gently wrestled with her daughter in the semidark, she tried to tell herself she was doing the right thing for Mother Earth. She quickly scraped Monique’s poop into a chamber pot, wrinkling her nose in distaste. They routinely saved the malodorous contents for recycling in the farm’s composting pits, but doing so was a hell of a hard sell at omigod-thirty with a thrashing baby kicking her heels in a puddle of what looked like undercooked chicken curry.