GPS (27 page)

“
Approaching, destination in, point, five miles.”

Jeff nearly screamed at the sudden sound of the GPS, jerking the steering wheel as he shuddered, and drawing immediate attention from the guards. A rickety beige pickup truck rolled up in the lane to his right (Jeff must have finally elbowed his way into the left lane when he leapt into this place). The truck had an appearance that assured Jeff he wasn’t wading through the late arriving crowd for the Owlz-Ghosts game in Utah, and that was the last thought about his old world that Jeff had for the next several hours.

The truck had four men sitting in the bed, all armed with machine guns and wearing unshaven faces blackened with soot and ash from a fire they were now likely trying to forget about. All four carried grim expressions, yet all looked completely satisfied somehow. They looked happy to be sitting down, happy to be alive. Jeff tried to imagine himself sitting with them, and found that he couldn’t. They were middle-aged men draped in rags of clothing browned in dirt, dried blood and dust, riding in the back of a truck on an uncertain mission by the looks of it. Yet as Jeff stared at them, he could almost detect a hint of a smile on their lips. Maybe not.

As soon as he had come crashing through (without a scratch this time), Jeff almost immediately realized there was no way of turning the car around. He’d arrived doing about 30 miles per hour and, as it turned out, that was about 30 miles per hour too fast for this road. Behind Jeff was a thickening line of cars, trucks and even what appeared to be some sort of tank back there. To his left, he was blocked in by a cement median at least six feet tall being patrolled by the guards who seemed equal in their measures of paranoia and ammunition. To the right, another clogged lane of traffic, the four men in the truck.

Jeff continued to inch around a slow bend in the road. The line of cars eventually steered right into the face of the world he’d been dreaming about. When he’d first come screeching up to the back bumper of a worn-looking Toyota truck minutes earlier, Jeff had briefly considered wheeling the car around wildly, risking being gunned down in order to flee the other direction after he saw the armed soldiers directing traffic. That feeling was replaced again by the reminder that he was getting exactly what he’d been asking for, so why run away even if he could?

The giant grapefruit-colored sun was setting in the west, and Jeff flipped down the visor on the Celica as he made the bend. The initial shock had worn off now, giving way to the sheer reality that he had no real idea where he was, where he was going or what would happen next. He also began to wonder, as he tried to take stock of all the other vehicles around him, if any of the other drivers on this road had any less of an idea what was going on than him.

His eyes were glazed over in the final blasts of the afternoon glare, reminding him of how tired he really was. When would he sleep? He could see the profile of the tall building the cars were being ushered toward, and it was definitely a baseball stadium. Again, he tried to catch a glimpse of anyone in the rough-looking crowd that looked even remotely similar to him. No one that he could see immediately, but there was a pretty ordinary car — looked like a Subaru station wagon — two cars back in his lane. Then one about five cars back on the right that looked to be a Mercedes or a Lexus, something way too nice for this turf.

As he inched closer to the stadium, passing gun-toting guards who all sent him haunting nods, the sun finally fell behind the cement façade of the main grandstand. As his eyes adjusted, Jeff could gradually make out the words chiseled into the building’s concrete face, and they gave him goosebumps as they became legible: Estadio Revolucion. There was ivy growing over the letters, and pretty much all over the stadium. Jeff could now see the place did, in fact, have a standard stadium parking lot, complete with booths likely built for baseball traffic and not wars. That’s where everyone was being herded.

He couldn’t ignore how antsy the soldiers seemed to be, how often they seemed to be bracing themselves for some sneak attack or some giant explosion, and then the real reason came crashing through from seemingly nowhere. A thud came from behind, causing Jeff first to rear back and look over his shoulder, then stick his head completely out the driver’s side window with a grimace on his face. The sound of metallic impact caused the guards to scramble up the sides of the cement median.

They looked like rodeo cowboys trying to save their hindquarters from a charging bull as a chain reaction of bumper-to-bumper impacts dominoed their way up the line of cars. A new recruit must have made a less successful arrival.

Jeff yanked his head back inside the car just in time to brace himself properly for the Chevy Bronco behind him to slam solidly into the Celica. The sudden jolt — and then the
conk!
of his own car’s front bumper knocking into the Four-Runner in front of him — left Jeff dazed enough to not even realize his engine died on impact. Everything stood still for a moment. Jeff collected himself, then grabbed at his keychain and tried to start the car. It didn’t respond. All the lights on the dashboard flashed, but the engine didn’t fire.

Suddenly petrified by the image of being dragged out of his unresponsive car and gunned down by the soldiers was enough to make Jeff start frantically cranking the Celica until, after at least a minute of failed attempts, it hummed back to life as though nothing was wrong. In front of him, a man who looked to be in his early 20s was gazing back at him from his rearview mirror with a frown, and unbuckling his seat belt. This time, there was no escape hatch being offered. If the guy in the Four-Runner wanted to fight him for being the 19
^th
car in a 20-car pileup, he could certainly take it up with the Federalies pacing the roadside.

“Get back in your car! Right now! Hawkins, get back in your car!” The man in front of him in the Four-Runner never even touched a toe to the ground before the soldiers closest to him had spun from watching the accident scene unfolding to aiming their guns squarely at the Four-Runner’s driver. How did they know his name with so many cars and drivers out here?

And then everyone including Jeff whirled back the other way again as a man, this one perhaps 30, shirtless, and sporting a collection of tribal tattoos picked right off the posters on the tattoo parlor wall was suddenly scrambling up the shoulder toward them. About 20 yards behind him was the man’s SUV, a red Yukon with the door hanging open and a smashed front end. About five yards behind him and gaining were five soldiers with their guns trained on the man.

But instead of opening fire, as Jeff was now bracing himself for, the soldiers simply tried to catch the man and stand in his way. They tried to grab him, but the man flailed his arms into the air and suddenly lunged to his left, grabbing for the top of the median wall and pulling himself up. The man scaled the wall, and as Jeff remained clenched for the sound of gunshots, he instead heard the same guard who’d asked him for his name shout, “Let him go! Let him go! No shoot him! No waste the bullets!”

The shirtless man paused for a moment at the top of the median and looked back, seemingly shocked himself not to be shot and killed by now, then scaled the top of the wall and slid down the other side. His panicked footfalls were quickly washed out by the sounds of horns and shouting from behind. The guards again dispersed down the road in attempt to regain order.

“Where the hell’s he going?” Jeff shouted aloud, leaning out of his car window and not at all realizing he was speaking out loud. The same guard who’d talked to him and who’d spared the man’s life seconds before turned and looked at Jeff with a grin.

“My friend, there are worse things than bullets that will kill you out there.”

- 32 -

From The (Orem, Utah) Daily Herald

May 8, 2008

Orem residents, police left wondering about bizarre accident

By Andy Reynolds

Daily Herald Staff Writer

A handful of Orem residents, including a Utah Valley State graduate student, a family of five and the Orem Police Department, is uncertain about the cause of a nine-car accident Wednesday evening.

Officers and emergency medical personnel were dispatched to the intersection of West University Boulevard and Sandhill Road shortly after 7 p.m., where a multiple-car accident, possibly a hit-and-run, was reported.

Although they had no trouble spotting the crash, authorities still cannot determine what, or who, caused the pileup. The incident produced no major injuries, but closed the intersection for more than an hour.

When they arrived, police officers found motorists arguing with one another as to who was at fault and what had happened. The only consistency in witness reports was that one car
—
described as a faded red Toyota Celica
—
was no longer at the scene of the accident.

“
The guy just roared right into oncoming traffic,” said Stacy Melido, who was uninjured despite her disabled car being removed from the scene on the back end of a tow truck. “We were all coming across University, and this guy just decides to drive right into all of us. Nuts. Totally nuts.”

The question still on the minds of police is where that car went and how the driver was able to flee the scene unnoticed.

Another witness said he was next to the Celica waiting out a red light on the eastbound side of University Boulevard when the driver “suddenly just floored it right into all of us,” causing the wreck.

“
There are some angry drivers out there, and he was definitely one of them,” said the witness, who chose to remain anonymous. “He was yelling at other drivers, even me I think, and this other guy pulled up next to him on the other side, and the guy started yelling at him too. Then he just floored it.”

Although numerous witnesses gave similar accounts of the accident and the driver in the red car who allegedly caused it, no one was able to identify where that driver went in the aftermath or obtain a license plate identification.

“
He was there, and then he was gone,” Anthony Davis, a UVS grad student, said of the mystery driver. “That’s all I can say.”

Orem police chief Omar Ellevante said his department is still investigating the crash, which forced six vehicles to be towed from the scene.

- 33 -

“Guns are beautiful creatures, aren’t they?”

Jeff recognized Paulo Fonseca immediately. The man now stood over him, petting Jeff’s Ruger .38 Blackhawk with his right hand. It was sweltering inside the tiny office beneath the spacious old baseball stadium. So many thoughts were at play inside Jeff’s jumbled head, he could not summarize everything that had happened and felt too tired to try.

He remembered the events of the previous day in only a clouded confusion, and in fact he could not recollect for certain what day it was now, or what had happened last night after he parked his car in the lot of the antique stadium and was ushered quickly through its main gate. He only knew that his body had shut down not long after that, and that he had been awakened with a start and without a hangover, only adding to the strangeness of the young day. He had been on a dusty mattress next to at least a dozen other men on mattresses camped out in one of the stadium’s outdoor hallways. Even the first rays of dawn had felt like mid-afternoon.

The man he’d seen in his head for weeks was now examining Jeff’s belongings, which were spread out on the table, looking like the beginning of a police interrogation. Most notably, they included the Ruger, the Winchester deer rifle, his laptop and an empty Bushmills bottle. The last item on the list was the first one that caught his attention when he walked into the room. If Jeff’s reaction to the bottle was some sort of test by Paulo, Jeff had failed, because his tired eyes lit up as soon as they met that dangerously familiar site. Empty bottles, like this one, seemed much more common than full ones in Jeff’s world.

The fact that this one was empty irritated Jeff, in part because empty ones, certainly this empty one sitting out on the table like evidence, likely meant more bad things than good, more unfun than fun. The full ones were full of fun and possibilities. Jeff felt ashamed for the longing look he knew was on his face when he saw it. But shame was a one-way street to annoyance to Jeff. And the fact was, shame or no shame, he would have forked over the guns and the computer right then for a chance to turn even that empty bottle upside-down, stick his tongue into the neck and pray for a few drops to roll down onto it. Instead, he sat in the dim room and listened. And listened.

On the wall to his left was something that kept pulling his attention away from the yet unmentioned whiskey bottle, and the incessantly rambling Fonseca. It was a large relief map of Mexico, like the ones yanked down from blackboards every day in schools across planet earth, though Jeff wasn’t convinced this was planet earth. The map was littered with thousands of tiny colored pins, depicting the both the history and the status quo of the revolucion to this point, what had happened in what place, who occupied which piece of land and how hard one side shoved the other.

Jeff learned that the invasion of the Freemen Brigade — those were the terrorists on the horses and in the black Range Rovers — had largely been made possible by the cartel wars. The rival drug factions in the nation had effectively taken millions of lives in the last half century, crumbled entire cities, disbanded the military, crippled an already failing economy and littered the countryside with bodies. The Freemen liked to believe it was their own sheer might and determination, Paulo said, which had allowed them to dissolve the border and take such a quick foothold in the north. But they had merely added to the death toll, and continued to do so with only the revolucion army left to slow their procession south.