GPS (30 page)

The gash on the man’s head sent blood fauceting onto the gun from above. Jeff stood still over the man, and as Simmons continued to wrestle with the apparently jammed-up Springfield rifle behind him in panicked breaths, Jeff tried to imagine what was supposed to happen next.

Never in his entire life had he considered what he would do if he ever took the upper hand in a gunfight, if he ever really did have another man dead to rights. This guy was trying to kill him a couple of minutes ago, and now Jeff was the killer if he wanted to be. Why wouldn’t Simmons tell him what to do? Why wasn’t he just taking over? Jeff didn’t dare take his gun or his gaze off the man, who hadn’t spoken a single word during the entire exchange, but who now wore a visible, bloody grin on his face despite keeping his head down and his hand on the pistol in the sand.

Nothing else moved inside the SUV, and suddenly Jeff was chilled by the lonely sound of the desert wind blowing around him. His hands started shaking again. He kept thinking Josh would suddenly unload the Springfield right into the guy, but it didn’t happen.

“Back away from the gun, man. Hablas ingles? Get the fuck away from the gun, man!” Jeff shouted. His terror became a sudden bolt of anger, and he raised his left leg to the man’s right shoulder, Ruger still trained on the man’s head, and tried to shove the man forcibly away from his own pistol. The second Jeff’s foot made contact, the man fell away from him and pawed at his gun with his left hand, pulling the trigger with his thumb and creating such a blast of sand in Jeff’s face, the dagger of pain in his right leg arrived on a three-second delay. The man on the ground took a much heavier dose of the sand, which flew almost directly into his blood-drenched face, forcing him to fall straight back and away from the gun, and for a split-second, showing Jeff a face that looked like cherry cobbler.

The bullet cut its path into the desert floor before ricocheting up and into the sky, and not before grazing the outside of Jeff’s right calf. It felt like he was being branded at a fraternity party, only the brand was still stuck to his skin. He let out a scream at the same second he heard Simmons finally breaking his silence from behind him. He didn’t hear what Simmons started yelling and never found reason to ask.

Instead of doing what seemed most natural at the time, giving in to the agony in his leg and collapsing to the ground to face whatever fate awaited, a few decades worth of unused endorphins rushed through Jeff’s body, enough to keep him standing and enough to race down his left arm and into his index finger. Within seconds, Jeff had littered the man’s body in bullets, until he was dry-firing and Josh was pulling the gun out of his hands. The dying man convulsed on the desert floor, still never uttering a word.

Simmons put a hand on Jeff’s shoulder, turning him away from the squirming body. Not another peep came from inside the truck, or from anywhere else in the desert. Once again, there was only the hot breeze. Jeff walked about five paces and fell onto his side, writhing and moaning in pain. Though the bullet had merely grazed him, his entire leg had been blasted with sand when the gun went off, making the gash feel like it was on fire. It was about then that the sunburn on his shoulders also took flame.

Jeff was content to slowly burn to a crisp right there in the desert until Josh emptied half of his canteen onto Jeff’s head, then the other half on the deep cut on his leg. Jeff reeled with another long moan, then clutched Josh’s arm and forced himself to his feet again.

At a hot, slow pace, and with Simmons’ T-shirt now knotted into a tourniquet on Jeff’s leg, the two men began to retrace what Simmons had earlier described as “a quick three-mile stroll” between the hills and the city. Neither man spoke until they were well out of the clutches of the open desert.

When Simmons did speak again finally, it wasn’t to Jeff but to a two-way cell phone.

“Hey honcho, we just had some heat out here. Can you get some guys on the scrub out here below, uhh, hang on.” Simmons pulled a tattered map out of his backpack and took great care in unfolding it, setting his two-way on the ground before he did. It sure looked like Mexico to Jeff.

The map was almost completely striped with what must have been thousands of hand-drawn roads, trails, paths and what appeared to be hideouts or camps, coded in the same colors as the map under the stadium. Covering almost every open inch of border space on all sides of the map were what appeared to be hundreds of notations written in penmanship befitting an architect. Mixed in at random all over the place were mythical-looking creatures drawn in frightening detail. There was a majestic green sea dragon haunting the Gulf of Mexico in the east, and a fire-orange bull charging through the southwest and aiming north. In the space north of the border, above a spaghetti-like criss-cross of drawn black lines, was a horrible-looking, obsidian-colored winged lion, which appeared to be bearing down on the entire nation beneath.

“Hey, it’s right below ridge six over here at Independencia, down from where I took Delaney out earlier. At least two, probably three or four downers out here. One guy was on a horse and the others were in a Rover. They wrecked it. Thing’s pretty beat up, but I think they can roll it over and tow it. Horse is headed for the shit, lost cause. No other traffic out there from what I can see. But those assholes were right out here on the edge man, that’s some close shit. Delaney got his training. Out.”

The radio answered in a jumble of Spanish, English and static which Jeff could not understand and which Josh seemed to ignore. Jeff felt like he should have had a million things to say, questions he should be asking as the two men continued walking — Jeff in an agonized limp — up onto an old, cracking highway and into the sprawl of a city which itself looked like a skeleton. Simmons, who sported the tan of a professional golfer, struggled to walk at a slow enough pace to stay next to the injured man to whom he’d been assigned. As Josh strode ahead again, Jeff studied the long, vertical tattoo that stretched from the base of his neck down to the small of his back. It appeared to mask an equally long, thin scar.

It was a wooden baseball bat being constricted by a spiraling black snake. It looked like something right off of Simmons’ map. There were three words around it, two that ran in vertical, stacked letters to the left and right of the bat, and one long horizontal word beneath. They said, “Dolor par Sapientiae.” Spanish, or Latin, or something Jeff could not decipher. He studied the tattoo for a long moment, not wanting to think about baseball, or anything else about home. But it piqued his curiosity.

“What year is it, Simmons?” Jeff asked finally, not wanting to ask what the tattoo meant, but breaking the silence nonetheless as the men plodded through a neighborhood that appeared completely uninhabited.

“Doesn’t matter,” Simmons said calmly, immediately, and without turning around, as though a million people had asked him that question before. “It’s almost summer, and you’re still alive.”

- 36 -

Jeff’s sleep, this time camped out in a tent in center field in the stadium, was poisoned by sunburn-induced fever and withdrawal. His relentless nightmares were even more detailed than the dreams which had helped persuade him to come back to this place.

He tossed and turned on the earth which seemed to lose its heat the second the sun set, but which only reminded him his own body was blazing in its skin. He heard the dying man’s gasps in the desert again and again as the bullets dug into his body. He heard the crack of the Springfield, felt the Blackhawk jerking back in his hands as he emptied its chamber in even, measured pops. The wind never stopped howling through the rocks.

In one of the dreams, Jeff had somehow missed every shot and fallen helplessly to his knees as the bleeding, grinning man raised his own gun out of the sand. In another, the man got up despite being filled with bullets and chased Jeff screaming through the desert. In one, the man hunched over and bleeding looked like Jeff himself, and in another, he was shooting at a skeleton. He even dreamed of the Springfield backfiring on Simmons and killing him, a dream so real it took Jeff several minutes in the light of the early morning to convince himself it hadn’t really happened.

Through the night, he saw a litany of his life’s mistakes suddenly interwoven through his new world. He saw flashes of Riley and even Lefty peeking through the scenes of bloodshed. Trying to sleep in the stadium could keep even the most normal, non-hallucinating, non-alcoholic, just-plain-tired tired man awake all night. Especially if he worried about every coyote howling in the distance, or every coyote scurrying right past the tent for that matter, and everything out there that sounded like a gunshot. You didn’t need much help to be scared out here in the dark.

Jeff’s throbbing leg had been treated and bandaged the night before. He’d also bathed himself in aloe from head to toe and had even gobbled four aspirin before bedding down in his tent. Still, the fever rocked Jeff’s brain tirelessly all night, taking control of the images he saw in his brain.

Through it all, the one overriding reality that carried him into the new day was that he had killed a man. He wasn’t able to convince himself otherwise when it came to that. His body ached, but did so as a reminder he’d actually done something other than drink in the last 24 hours. That reminder was quickly overrun by another, the reminder of how quickly he would suck down a glass of whiskey if he could. And with that, he began to wonder again how soon he could leave this place.

The real pictures of the previous day began to develop, and with them Jeff remembered telling himself while leaning his sun-scorched back into a cactus and bracing himself for a bullet that if he lived through the day, he would find his way back out as soon as possible. He had lived, and knew he did not have the same drive as the others did to do it all again. To do it again today and tomorrow and to keep on doing it until his card finally got pulled seemed pointless.

Rolling onto one side and then another inside the tent, trying to escape his smoldering skin, Jeff became fully awake, enough to remember not only what had and had not happened but enough to start wondering what would happen next. He grabbed at the tent’s zipper door to release the staggering heat from within. It was always so much earlier than it felt when you woke up in a hot tent in the morning. He stood painfully up and out into the morning air and stretched, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the corpse he’d created. Just a couple of miles away, undoubtedly still lying in the same position it was when he left it, was the lifeless corpse of a man he murdered, now waiting to become just another pile of bones in the desert.

The sun blinded Jeff as he stepped out. Around him, dozens of tents littered not only the outfield, but the infield and all the foul territory beyond. Both bullpens had been cordoned off to house supplies, as had most of the offices and both clubhouses beneath the stadium, according to Paulo’s long discourse the previous morning.

Apparently, there was no pressure in this war — at least on this side of it — to learn anything extra or unnecessary. So while Jeff was blasting away at a cactus the previous day, prior to killing his first Freemen fighter, all the other nuts who had jumped back and forth between worlds had apparently gone through their own training. That’s what Josh had told him the day before as they hiked up the incline.

Jeff wondered if any of the other newcomers who’d spent the night sleeping on the baseball field had also shot and killed their first FB soldier as part of their training. He doubted it. He wondered how Simmons had described the events to the men that mattered, namely to Paulo. When it came to the Springfield, he couldn’t hit the ground from an airplane, it seemed. When it came to blowing away injured men at close range with a handgun, however, Jeff was well-trained already.

“Delaney! Hobble over here!”

Jeff spun around at the edge of the infield where second base would normally be, trying to locate the source of the voice as it now echoed through the large, shadowed grandstands. His gashed leg and his right knee both objected strongly from below.

“Third base, Delaney, third base!”

The voice sounded like Lou Costello in his famous routine for a moment as Jeff scanned the seats behind third base to see about 10 men sitting in the visitors dugout. They were mostly smiling, and as Jeff began limping their direction, he wondered if it was out of admiration or ridicule. He realized immediately his body was practically glowing with sunburn. The men came into full focus, and Jeff expected to hear them start laughing at him. Instead, they just smiled and gazed, as though the man limping into view was something new to them. He guessed he was.

Fonseca was at the far left end of the bench like a manager, looking into the same flashing, handheld device in his left hand he always seemed to hold, and glancing up at the oncoming Jeff every so often as he did. “How’s the leg, bro?” he asked.

Jeff didn’t answer. He continued to hobble all the way to the top step of the dugout, where he now saw eight men of different ages and apparent nationalities looking back at him besides Fonseca. He didn’t see Simmons, but he recognized another young guy, the one whose rear bumper he’d hit in traffic the other night. Jeff could tell the guy recognized him too, especially when Jeff involuntarily smirked at the man.

“These are some of our guys, Delaney, some of your guys now too,” Fonseca said, finally pulling the mini GPS away from his face and shoving it into the pocket of his jeans. “I was just telling these guys how you got into the shit on your first day yesterday. Simmons might have gotten waxed out there, sounds like, which would have been a big blow, so you earned your place, chico.”

Jeff studied the man at the end of the dugout for several silent seconds before responding. He had always been more of an interrupter than a listener, and he noticed himself intentionally using a cooler demeanor suddenly. “My place?” he said calmly. “Which place is mine?”

A few of the men snickered, and even Paulo smiled, a most unmilitary response, Jeff thought. “Your place in paradise, friend. You earned your right to make a difference and be whoever you wanna be. You let yourself go out there yesterday because you had to. You had to survive and you did. You saved Simmons’ ass too.” Jeff stood and stared, hoping his incredulous feeling was being properly represented in his facial expression. He wasn’t sold on staying here for any of this craziness, and didn’t want to look like he was.