Kindred Intentions (11 page)

“Now!” the former said.

Amelia stopped thinking; pretending that
everything around her had ceased, she rose, aimed the weapon at the dark of the
night and started pulling the trigger.

Yasir rose as well. A concert of shots filled
the silence in a moment. Flashes of light, glares, shouts. She saw one of the
figures out there collapse. But a third one appeared from nowhere, as if it had
been generated by the wood.

“Argh!” Yasir shouted.

Amelia let herself fall down and turned to
him, stripping the visor off her eyes. The man was lying on the floor and
holding his shoulder.

A movement, intercepted on the left with the
corner of her eye, a reflection. She turned. A figure was standing at the
bedroom door and was pointing a gun. A flash accompanied by a gunshot and the
figure ended up on the ground, replaced by Mike.

Another one appeared right after, jumping on
him. They ended up on the floor, nothing more than two fighting silhouettes,
from time to time illuminated by the glare of an accidental shot.

Dazed, Amelia held her own gun in front of her
with both hands, wincing at each flash, unable to decide what to do. Why did
she take the visor off? She was the extra man, but she was no use, because she
didn’t see fuck all. Which of them should she shoot?

A third intruder emerged from the door.
Kneeling under the window, Amelia aimed and pulled the trigger, once, twice,
three times. A moan, and the intruder fell. How many shots were left? She’d
lost count.

Another man was flung at a step from her. She
swung the direction of her weapon on him. A glare reflected by the clouds
penetrating the room illuminated a face she didn’t know. She’d have to shoot
him in his head, but that information refused to translate into action. Their
gazes met; he was lying down, unable to defend himself, while she was towering
over him with a weapon.

Mike arrived, raised a foot and lowered it
onto the other man’s head.

Something entered the wide-open window with a
hiss and landed in the middle of the room, bouncing twice. Straight away, it
started emitting thick smoke.

“Fuck,” Mike exclaimed. “Yasir, you okay?”

Amelia’s eyes started watering. That acrid
smell made her cough.

“No, my friend,” the other replied with
difficulty. “I got caught … they’re too many. They’re about to enter …” He let
a groan escape. “You two must go.”

“Not without you.” Mike moved through the fog
to reach him in the adjacent room. She saw him bending over his friend. “I’m
taking you away from here.” He grabbed him by his armpits and helped him sit.

Yasir supported himself with a hand on the
table. “No, I’m done for … you know that, too.” He extended the other arm to
point at something. “Give me the rifle … I’ll keep them busy … I’ll draw as
many as possible.”

“No, fuck, no.” Mike was shaking his head. His
outline was becoming less clear behind Amelia’s tears.

Machine-gun fire burst from the bedroom. She
threw herself down, hoping that the smoke would hide her. She watched the owner
of the weapon advancing towards her. The flash from the shots illuminated his
face for a moment. Amelia aimed at him and shot back. The machine-gun stopped,
but no moan was heard, no body falling. Her gaze turned with horror to the
slide of her weapon, which was completely backward. Empty. Then beyond it there
was a pair of black boots, two legs, a body, a machine-gun; the face of her
murderer smiled at her.

A shot. The smiled turned off. The man fell in
front of her.

“Take this!” Mike exclaimed, throwing
something at her.

Amelia grabbed the magazine on the fly with
her left hand, as she released the empty one, letting it slip down to the
floor. She clicked in the new magazine.

More gunshots behind her, outside. Another
shot at her right. Yasir, who was bent over the table in an unstable position,
replied to the fire through the window.

Two more men burst into the room.

Amelia snapped to her feet, where the smoke
was being dispersed by the air current, and pulled the trigger like mad, hoping
to score some good shots.

Not far from her, Mike was doing the same.
“Enough!” he shouted at her after a few seconds.

She stopped, awakening at once from that
condition of trance. The aggressors were all down. She felt she was being
pushed sideways. Mike dragged her near to the fireplace, forcing her to sit
down on the floor again.

She saw him retrieve something. The light of
the tablet illuminated the smoke. What was he doing?

A slight tremor and then the fireplace started
moving, making her lose her balance as it revealed to her the top of a flight
of stairs.

“Go down,” he whispered to her, inviting her
to follow his orders quickly with a slap on her back.

She could hear some stamping all around her.
They were coming. Risking a stumble, Amelia went down, bending forward. A smell
of mould hit her, as she entered deep underground. Mike was on her heels. Only
now she noticed that he was holding his rucksack on his shoulders. Over his
head the fireplace was closing, blocking the passage.

In a few seconds it was pitch black again. And
right after that, light.

She tried to shield her sight with both hands.
One was still holding her weapon.

“Come on, we must go quickly.” Mike overtook
her and kept going down.

Forcing herself to keep her eyes open as much
as was necessary to see where she was putting her feet, she followed him.

About twenty steps lower down, the stairs
ended in what looked like a long corridor. The tunnel. That was what they’d
meant. It was illuminated by many small ceiling lights, connected to each other
by a conduit. The fact that the light was working meant it didn’t depend on the
generator, but rather they had an emergency power supply. Actually they weren’t
very bright, but after spending all that time in the dark, now she felt as if
she was on a stage under the spotlights.

“Keep moving,” Mike urged her, once she had
come to the bottom of the stairs. He took her free hand and pulled her to him.
“You don’t need that one now.” He gestured to her gun. His had already been put
back in his belt.

Amelia did the same and followed him along the
tunnel. The floor was wet and slippery. A rivulet of water was flowing in the
direction that they were walking in, revealing an incline. The walls were
reinforced concrete. She started touching the one on her right. They weren’t
running, but he was imposing a fast pace on her, so she needed to hold herself
against something to avoid losing her balance.

Her eyes were still burning and her throat was
aching because of the teargas. In that surreal silence she wished she could
rearrange her thoughts, but it was difficult enough just staying upright.

All at once a deep rumble was heard and
everything started trembling around them. Amelia shouted. Behind them, rubble
of various sizes rolled down the stairs. A blast filled the place with dust.

“They are in,” was Mike’s laconic comment; he
hadn’t been perturbed by hearing the explosion. It was certainly something he
was expecting.

“Did Yasir …?” The question died in her mouth.

“Blew up the lodge, everybody near it and
inside it.” He paused to sigh. “And himself.”

Amelia scrutinised his mournful face. That had
been the plan: drawing them in, then escaping through the tunnel and blowing up
most of them. But it wasn’t expected that someone would remain behind. “The
others will think we’re dead in the explosion, too.”

“I hope so. Or at least I hope they’ll believe
so for a while.” Mike kept proceeding with an absent gaze. Who knew which
thoughts were able to unsettle him?

She saw again in her mind the gory way he had
killed that man, who was disarmed. He’d said they would take no prisoners, but
breaking his neck with a kick had been so inhuman. She couldn’t find a better
way to define it. That man was there to kill them; how could she feel pity for
him and blame Mike? No, it wasn’t pity, but a form of disgust in remembering
the noise produced by the bones breaking, the sight of blood, the horrible
aspect of his face afterwards. Pure horror. How could you remain insensitive in
front of that?

“There was no need to kill him that way.” She
had allowed her thoughts to become words. She was feeling any sort of filter
connecting her brain to her mouth fail. She couldn’t even remember why she
should have had one. “I had him at gunpoint.”

He didn’t slow his pace. Perhaps he would
ignore her comment. What could he say? “You were hesitating.” That was what he
could say. “In your shoes, he wouldn’t have.”

It was impossible for her to find something to
say back. No word would be able to transmit what she felt. And perhaps he
wouldn’t have understood anyway.

“It was just a number to me,” Mike said,
moving his head slightly, as if he wanted to highlight that simple concept.
“You hadn’t ever killed someone while looking at them in the eye.” For a moment
he shifted his gaze to her. “The one you’d shot earlier blindly doesn’t count.
It isn’t the same thing, you had no choice.”

“I have never killed anybody before today.” Except
Joseph. This time the filter worked well, because she succeed in not speaking.
It hadn’t been her who killed her son. She knew that full well, consciously,
but she felt like she had, because his death had been incomprehensible, because
she had been there and could have chosen a different road, or maybe just slowed
down at the junction, even if the traffic light was green. Or she could have
died in his place.

“I preferred to save you one more, given that
I could.”

The implied kindness of those words, of the
gesture they described, were in contrast with the brutality shown when he’d
done it. It seemed more suitable to the man she had met earlier and to whom
she’d felt attracted.

“I’m sorry for Yasir.”

Mike pulled a face. “I don’t think so; you’ve
known him for half an hour.” His kindness had disappeared again.

“I’m sorry for
you
, because he was your
friend.”

He emitted a faint amused snort. “You barely
know me, too.” Diffidence, that was what his kindness had turned to, even if he
was masking it with sarcasm.

“Right now I feel like I know you better than
most people I deal with every day.”

“Perception deceives us, lets us see what we
want to see.” His sarcasm had now turned into cynicism.

 “But sometimes it’s all we have.” With the
passing of time, Amelia had become a master in bombarding her perceptions with
stimuli, to avoid facing reality. “I liked you better when I thought you were a
good man.”

“And I liked you better while fucking you, at
least you kept silent,” he retorted, without hesitation, ill-concealing his
annoyance.

Strangely enough, she didn’t feel humiliated
by that remark. She’d expected it. “Do you see? You can’t shock me anymore.
Once your mask is gone, from time to time you feel the need to hurt who’s
beside you, to affirm your position of superiority.”

As an answer, Mike lengthened his stride,
pulling her along. She’d hit the nail on the head.

“But perhaps I’m wrong, I’ve never been so
good at understanding people. Maybe this is the reason why I attract arseholes.
I must have a kind of magnet.” She waited for any reaction from him, but there
was none. “Present company excluded, of course.”

He let a half smile escape. “Instead, I must
have a kind of magnet for bitches.” He turned to watch her. “Present company
excluded … of course.”

And Amelia took the bait, in defiance of all
her good resolutions. “Fuck off!”

Mike laughed.

“You’re an arsehole.”

“And you’re a bitch.”

She screwed up her face, blaming herself for
being dragged into that pointless argument. He kept insulting and mortifying
her, and she couldn’t oppose him in any way. All that enraged her.

“Come on, you must admit it.” It seemed that
he still hadn’t had enough. His sneer didn’t predict anything good. “After
being kidnapped, the accident, the trekking … your only thought was to score a
shag. You almost raped me.” And he laughed at his own joke.

“Hark at him!” Amelia had some difficulty in
remaining serious, too. “You turned me inside out. I’m still sore!”

“Oh, poor thing.”

“I’m serious,” she said, now calmer. “I liked
your gentle version. If I’d known what type you were, I wouldn’t have tried to
rape
you, you can be sure.”

“You don’t convince me. You still like me,
perhaps even more.”

“You’re so full of yourself …” Amelia let his
hand go and shoved him to move him away. But she put a foot on the rivulet of
water and lost balance.

Mike grabbed her arm, preventing her from
falling. “Careful,” he scolded her. Any trace of hilarity had gone. “If you
break something, I’ll be forced to leave you here. I won’t drag useless loads.”