Don't Look Back (25 page)

He cleaned the kitchen, handled the remaining matters, then threw the old man over his shoulder. After Jay Rudwick the frail body felt like nothing at all.

He stepped outside. The rain was steady and refreshing. It mixed with his sweat, and he smelled the heat of the day’s exertion lifting from his skin. He studied the starless sky. Like a spill of ink. Lightning cracked again, showed the churning clouds. Five seconds to the thunder. The storm moving away.

This would benefit his enemies. There were seven left. He had counted them on the river and at the ruins, and Jay Rudwick had confirmed it. Seven who knew that Bashir was here. Who knew his face. Who could reveal him to the world as Usama had been revealed. Another holy warrior disgraced and diminished. Bashir would be reduced to another set of grainy photographs in a newspaper. Images of his little house, perhaps even his corpse. His personal habits pored over. Undignified details polished to a high glitter. His holy work defiled, spread and dissected like a curiosity.

No.

Between the storm and the bridge, his enemies were trapped. The range was isolated, the villages cleared out for the wet season. The mountains would be wrecked in the wake of the
tormenta.
The roads a mess. Going up and over the range simply would not be an option. Not for days.

But first light would bring opportunities. Satellite reception might return. They could make their way downslope. The river would be shallower, and there would be chances for crossing.

The warmth drained from the body into his shoulder, his cheek. He hitched it higher and started through the tall elephant grass.

Lightning again. Now six seconds until the rumble. With morning would come a lessening.

But there was still plenty of night left.

He reached the edge of the wallow, squinting into a wet gust of wind. The crocodile had come across now to the near side where the bundle had been. He saw Bashir nearing and spread his mighty jaws. Snaggleteeth pointed this way and that. He showed his pink-white maw, and breath hissed up the meaty tunnel from his gut.

Bashir did not slow. He skirted the edge, drawing within a few yards of the mighty beast. He dipped his shoulder. Don Silverio slid off and landed with a thud behind him.

The mud crackled as the crocodile swung his head to his next meal. Bashir was cultivating in him quite a taste for blood. That was good.

There would be more.

MONDAY

Chapter 34

“Mom. Mom?
Mom. Mom? MOM?
”

“Mnff.”

“Get up, Mom.”

Nicolas’s face looms, twenty-five degrees offset. Those long lashes, that partial squint he wears when he is without glasses. The pillow feels like silk against her cheek. Through a rise of bunched fabric, she notes the time on the nightstand clock—
5:36
A.M.
Somewhere through the murk, her brain registers that it is Saturday and that this is an uncivilized hour to be awake on a weekend, not fit for man or beast. She burrows into the warmth of the sheets.

“Come on, Big. Get up. I’m hungry.”

“Mnff.”

“When’s breakfast?”

Then: “I’m starving.”

Then: “I’ve been up a
hour
already.”

She rolls onto her back, grinds the heel of her hand into an eye socket. “You didn’t eat anything, did you?”

“Yeah. I ate a gluten pancake.”

Lanie’s joke. Less funny at 5:37
A.M.
on a Saturday.

“Mom. Mom?”

“Yuh.”

“I want a puppy.”

“A puppy. At 5:37 in the morning.”

“Well, not like
right now.
I don’t think the dog stores are open, prob’ly. I want a Labrador maybe, ’cuz they make the cutest puppies. Or a Rhodesian ridgeback like Zach has. He makes this bark like
woof.
Like it’s rumbling his whole body. And his face? He gets these wrinkles on his forehead like this?” Nicolas’s mouth twists, but no wrinkles appear on
his
forehead. “Wait—like
this.
” Still no wrinkles. “On his face? And it’s like he’s thinking real hard and—”

“We’re not getting a puppy, Little.”

“I can take care of him, though. You wouldn’t have to do
anything.
”

“Mm-hm.”

Across on the wall, a framed family portrait from a few years ago gazes out. She and Rick with Nicolas tucked between them, a cheery triad against a fake nature backdrop of pine trees and a waterfall. Who had chosen
that
? They looked like suburbanite elves. Sweaters in the Mist. At least once a week, she debated taking it down, but then she wondered what signal that would send to Nicolas, and then she’d wonder what signal she was sending by
not
taking it down, and by the time she got done with all that wondering, she was usually late for work.

“You’d
love
him.” Nicolas: still back on the puppy.

She shoots a breath at the ceiling. Beside her the space Rick used to occupy stretches neatly, the sheets smooth and tucked in. The bed is half made and half unmade, and it strikes her that this would be a delightful metaphor to contemplate were her faculties not muffled by exhaustion.

Two little hands grip her fingers and tug, lifting her deadweight two inches off the pillow. He lets go, and she collapses back.

“Mom!”

“Just a little longer. I’ll let you stay up till midnight. I’ll buy you Superman action—”

“Batman.”

“—figures. I’ll let you skip school for a week.”

“Nuh-uh. You’re lying.”

“You’re right. Except about the letting-me-sleep part.”

“I’ll let you sleep…”

She recognizes the not-so-subtle crafty set of his features. “If
what
?”

“If I can have a puppy.”

She rustles up into a more coherent lump against the headboard. “Nicolas Richard Hardaway. Don’t you make me use your middle name.”

“You just did.”

“There’s more where that came from.”

His stick arms fold across his chest, and one foot taps, the bearing of a hustler he’s picked up from the playground or the fox in
Pinocchio.
“Deal or no deal, Big?”

“
Why
do you want a puppy?”

“Because—”

The bedroom wall erupts in a fireball.

Drywall flies in shrapnel chunks. The faux-sylvan portrait shatters outward, shards spinning, the dopey posed grins evaporating into flame. The explosion blows back the sheets, ripping them straight off her body, peeled upward from her toes and flattened, in a carnival effect, against the headboard above her. She reaches for Nicolas, her hand closing around his for a fleeting instant before he is blown away also, propelled into the bathroom, and her mouth is open and she is screaming, but there can be no sound above the awesome rush of the overpressure, the bulge of vivid orange mushrooming across her bedroom to claim her when—

Eve lurched awake on the floor of Harry and Sue’s adobe hut, jolting up into a different realm. Nightmare and reality were intertwined, and she knew neither which was which nor which was worse. The adobe walls rattled still with an aftershock, the east-facing window had blown out, and beyond in the lodge a ring of fire burned around one of the activity-center tents. The overhanging branches had been turned to charcoal, and higher limbs crackled, sizzling beneath the rain. Vines waggled, tipped with flame.

Inside the hut everyone bobbed more than moved, lower halves mired in quicksand. Lulu swayed, one cheek feathered with slivers of glass; she’d gotten the worst of the window. Sue curled into the wall, Harry leaning over her protectively. Neto had grabbed the machete, Fortunato the folding knife, but both stood transfixed, staring at the still-closed door. Grabbing the flashlight, Will fell off the bed, landing hard on his good foot and bellowing in pain. Somehow he managed to hop across the hut and throw the door open.

The bitter smell of ash and flame swept in on the wet breeze, laced with something sharper.

Mezcal.

Will said, “He’s here.”

Lulu raised a hand to her cheek, felt the embedded fragments, and screamed. A web of blood overlay her precise makeup and the edge of her fluffed, champagne-colored hair. The cuts, painful-looking but superficial, were less distressing than the sight of her perfect skin rent; it was obscene and incongruous, like coming upon the cracked head of a porcelain doll. Claire moved toward her, but before she could get there, Lulu careened to the left, a panic sprint that sent her directly into the wall. She smacked into it, bouncing off and toppling over.

Neto seized his wife’s arm and hauled her to her feet. Will did his best to wield the Maglite like a baton, but each hop seemed to knock the air out of him, causing him to double over. They moved outside as a group, emerging onto the bamboo walkway. Morning was little more than a premonition to the east, limning the highest leaves with gold. Rain smothered the embers over by the tent. Smoke coated Eve’s lungs, and she gagged and coughed, not missing a step. They moved forward toward the central clearing, instinct holding them in a loose circle formation, facing outward. They watched the jungle, and it watched them right back.

“The alcohol,” Neto said. “He used it to build a bomb.”

“Yeah,” Claire said. “We got that.”

Sue gave a stifled cry, retreated a few steps from the edge of the stable, and buried her face in Harry’s shirt. The sun broke the top of the canopy, casting a sheet of light into the stables as if to highlight the scene within.

The burros had been slaughtered. Fresh blood matted their coats, the limbs and heads twisted a few degrees too far this way and that. The smell was rank—innards and offal. The farthest two were long gone, hack marks mercifully hidden by the way their bodies had collapsed, but the third looked up at them with a bulging black orb of an eye. Its lips peeled away from domino-tile teeth. A notch was missing in its bent-back neck, the machete having taken a doorstop-size bite from the throat, and breath fluttered the ragged skin of the edges. The ribs rose and fell lurchingly, bellows that had sprung a leak, exhaling sonar-deep sounds of pain through the hole. The flies had already begun their work.

Tears fell from Neto’s eyelashes as he dropped the machete and crouched over the burro, stroking its nose. It gave a life-voiding gasp, shuddered, and was still.

Neto bowed his head. “At least Ruffian ran off in the storm,” he said. “That saved him from being killed.”

“Look over here.” Wobbling on his good foot, Will pointed at the quads, nestled in their stalls. The tires had been slashed.

Harry squatted over a flipped-back tarp, his hands running along the yellow vinyl of the raft as if bunching pantyhose. Eve was unsure what he was doing at first, until he shifted and she saw that he was evaluating the length of the slice gouged through the hull.

“Dios mío,”
Lulu said.
“Dios mío dios mío dios mío.”

The burros and the raft were sufficient for Eve to grasp the situation. With slow-dawning dread, she pivoted to face the admin shack, knowing already what she’d see. The satellite dish had been smashed, curved Humpty Dumpty pieces still rocking on the roof. She finished her half turn, shifting her weight to see past the van parked beneath the cantina roof. Her gaze zeroed in on the food-storage cabinets behind the oversize grill. The contents spilled and torched, burned lettuce heads ground into the mud, milk glugging from split cartons, bits of ice floating in moats of melt.

She came full circle, the others clustered loosely around her, having instinctively moved away from the stables into the open. Neto’s hands were stained with blood from the burro. But empty. Five feet beyond his sandaled foot, in the place where the machete had been, there was now nothing but a skid in the dirt. Eve’s eyes rose to the deep shadows of the stalls, the countless dark patches between the leaves.

“The machete,” she said.

Neto looked at his palms. Over his shoulder at the skid in the dirt. His lips wavered.

“Where is it?” Eve asked.

“Right there. I left it
right there.
”

“Then where is it?” Harry said.

“
He
took it,” Neto said.

“Without us seeing?” Harry said. “How?”

“Because that’s what he
does,
” Eve said. “The fire was just cover to sabotage—”

A bang sounded behind her—not an explosion but a clap of wood against wood. By the time she whirled to face across the clearing toward Harry and Sue’s adobe hut, she caught nothing but the rebounding door and a violent nodding of fronds at the jungle’s edge. Fortunato raised the unfolded steak knife and pointed up the bamboo walkway as if the tip of the blade could shoot bullets.

“We need to get inside,” Will said. “We’re too exposed out here.”

“He was just
in
there,” Claire said.

“Shit,” Harry said. “What did he do? What did he
take
?”

“We’ll check it out slowly and carefully,” Will said. “But we need to get out of the open. And that hut’s the only halfway decent cover right now.”

He was right—despite the blown-out windows, Harry and Sue’s upscale adobe structure was still the most secure, the only one with actual walls and a roof. They retreated to it cautiously, Fortunato in the front. On the porch he paused to steel himself, then opened the door warily. The rusted hinges gave a haunted-house creak. He leaned inside, leading with the knife, then nodded to them. They nudged their way into the hut. A man’s smell lingered inside, the powerful aftertrace of body odor. Wet wind sucked at the window, bringing smoke-tinged air.

Despite the moist heat, Lulu was shuddering violently, her teeth chattering, her arms vibrating so intensely they seemed possessed. In the morning light, Eve caught a better look at the glass slivers crusting her left cheek. Once cleaned up, the mess wouldn’t be as bad as it looked; faces tended to bleed impressively. Fifteen minutes with a tweezers could alleviate the physical damage, but Lulu’s emotional equilibrium would be tougher to regain. First things first—tweezers and alcohol.