So Ricky grew up. Peaceably, prosperously, by the standards of the time, for neither he nor his family nor anyone in the ville went hungry. And, after he found his way to his uncle’s shop, quite happily.
Until that morning.
Chapter Fourteen
J.B., Ryan noted with wry amusement, was staring at the boy across the fire as if he’d invented him.
“You’re handy with boobies, are you?” Ryan asked.
Ricky’s eyes got wide. At some point Ryan had stopped thinking of him as the captive, or even just the boy. He drank eagerly from a tin cup of water Mildred had handed him. Somewhere in there Ryan had also allowed Krysty to cut the kid’s hands free, too, although he remained hobbled.
The fact was, Ryan saw no reason to doubt his story. He reckoned Ricky might be holding something back. But then,
he
would have, and he judged this boy was a sight more scrupulous and less case-hardened than he’d been at the age. He’d been a year younger, truth to tell, when an older brother’s terrible treachery had cost him his eye, his family and the life he’d known as Baron Titus’s privileged—if never pampered—youngest son.
“Boobies?” Ricky asked doubtfully.
“He means booby traps,” Mildred said, taking back the cup with a slight twisted smile. “The kind you like to set for people chasing you. Not the other kind of boobies.”
“The birds?” Ricky asked, his big eyes round and seemingly honestly confused. Doc guffawed and slapped his thigh.
“An innocent!” he declared. “That’s a rare and wondrous thing in this age. Perhaps in any, and for a fact, he would have been so even in my far more constrained and circumspect time.”
“He didn’t grow up during the Summer of Love, that’s for sure,” Mildred said, her smile turning a bit wistful.
“So, yeah,” Ricky said. He was plainly adrift in their conversation, and clutching for the last solid plank that had floated by. “I guess. I did get pretty good with traps.”
His face knotted like a gaudy barkeep’s rag. “Not that I ever got a chance to try them out. Until today.”
* * *
O
VER
THE
PAST
YEAR
OR
TWO
,
news had come that disturbed the still waters of Nuestra Señora. A leader was rising in the hills to the northwest. A man who called himself El Guapo, “The Handsome,” and styled himself grandiosely as general. Once a simple bloody-handed bandit, he had managed to amass a large and growing force.
Now he claimed he was on a mission: to unite the island and save the people from the anarchy they suffered under.
Ricky had first heard about him about sixteen months previously, when José Morales’s mule train reached a tiny ville in the foothills. They learned of an exceptionally large gang of coldhearts, bad enough and bold enough to attack and overrun smaller villes with ease.
From then on, news of El Guapo’s conquests—and brutality—began pouring in, first from other contacts along the trade route José followed, then into Nuestra Señora itself from travelers and traders.
A few months back a handful of men and women had arrived, following the coast on a raft. Even Ricky, who didn’t know much about the sea despite living beside it, in a ville that drew much of its sustenance from it, understood that was a triple-dangerous way to travel.
The new arrivals spoke English with a funny accent that Ricky said put him in mind of Jak’s. They said El Guapo’s men had given them an ultimatum: surrender to his “government” or die. The people chose resistance.
The coldhearts had hit them in the middle of the night, torching their ville and boats and massacring them. As far as they knew, the five or six of them on the raft were the only survivors.
Although a big storm was approaching, the refugees had chosen to move on after only a couple of days. Soon, El Guapo and his sec boss, Tiburón, had come after them. And there was no withstanding their numbers, their firepower or their callous cruelty.
* * *
A
S
THE
BOY
PAUSED
to gulp down a fresh cup of water, Ryan looked around at his companions. J.B. frowned slightly. Doc had his head tipped to one side. Krysty’s lips were pressed tight and colorless; her eyes were bleak. Mildred’s eyes were all big and round like a startled cat’s.
“So what happened next?” Ryan asked when the kid had oiled up his throat once more.
* * *
R
ICKY
STATED
THAT
a couple of weeks ago a single-masted skiff had sailed into Nuestra Señora’s neat little anchorage. On board was a terrified tillerman, two sec men and El Guapo himself.
Ricky had seen them bracing the mayor in the ville’s plaza. He had run some cookware his uncle had mended to the García family, and was returning to the shop with a nice fresh-caught red snapper, like the ones his captors were consuming, as payment.
The crowd gathering had attracted his attention, so he hovered on the fringe to see what was going on.
Mayor Parrilla stood facing the group. The way he was sweating was unusual even for him in the midday tropical sun, and Ricky could just make out the way his eyes slid around to look everywhere but at his visitors. He was anything but happy about the confrontation.
From the mutters of adults around him, Ricky quickly understood who the visitors were. The man speaking was El Guapo’s notorious sec boss, Tiburón. One glimpse and Ricky had no question where his name, Spanish for
shark,
came from: his oddly shiny gray face thrust forward into some kind of muzzle that came to a point in place of a nose. When he spoke, the words came out in a strange but carrying sibilant lisp, past what looked like rows of curved yellow teeth. He was immense, over six feet tall, bare arms fat with muscle. His sloping head was either shaved clean or naturally hairless.
He recited a list of demands in Spanish: that the ville immediately and unconditionally accept the authority of something calling itself Ejército de la Unidad Nacional—EUN for short—the Army of National Unity. That they agree to trade only with communities and individuals who had likewise sworn allegiance to El Guapo, and pay a tariff on every commercial transaction plus such other taxes as deemed necessary. That they give up their arms. And that they send regular drafts of young men and women to serve the army.
That made Mayor Parrilla sweat so furiously that it visibly weighed down his famed mustache. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his fat gullet, and his eyes swept furiously right and left.
He clearly wanted to cave in. Though Ricky’s parents were avid supporters of the mayor, and his uncle disdainfully refused to discuss or even consider politics of any sort, most people, when they spoke of the mayor at all, did so in anything but flattering terms.
The band of eight leading citizens, men and women, who stood right behind the mayor fairly bristled with the weapons El Guapo wanted them to give up. Ricky decided they had to be there, not to guard against Handsome’s bandits—if they started any violence, such a small group would stand no chance of getting back to their boat alive—but to put some much-needed steel in Parrilla’s spine.
But Parrilla gathered up his nerve, puffed himself up to full height and announced in a ringing voice that he had to unconditionally refuse such outrageous demands. Nuestra Señora would never surrender to coldhearts.
At his words, El Guapo’s face had turned first maroon, then white. Laying eyes on the bandit chief for the first time, Ricky couldn’t understand why he was called the Handsome One. He was anything but. His features were distorted horribly into unnatural grooves and ridges, and he seemed to have no nose but rather a hole in his face. But even at this distance Ricky could tell that, unlike his congenitally grinning sec boss, he wasn’t a mutant. His disfigurement wasn’t the result of birth, but of some prolonged work by someone with a blade and maybe something very hot. It was scar tissue, nothing less.
Tiburón never raised that deceptively gentle voice of his. “Forever is a long time, Señor Mayor,” he said. “But it is something those who oppose us get to experience, quite soon. Are you sure you won’t reconsider?”
Parrilla turned to look openly at the citizen delegation standing behind him. If they were afraid of the bandit lord and his mutie henchman they showed it by jutting their jaws and holding their blasters even higher.
“I will not,” Parrilla said to the coldhearts, in the voice of a man sentencing himself to death.
“So be it,” El Guapo declared in a ringing baritone. His voice, at least, really was handsome. He turned and stalked toward the harbor. Tiburón and the two unspeaking bodyguards followed.
When an excited Ricky brought the news to his uncle, the man’s response astonished him.
“They should have chilled them all when they had the chance,” he spat. “El Guapo and his vermin. That misguided act of mercy will come back to bite them on their asses. Bite us all on the asses. Mark my words, boy. Mark them well.”
Ricky had been too dumbfounded to respond. In learning to fight he had wandered pretty far astray from his parents’ path of nonviolence. But they had imbued their gentle values in him. The idea of killing anyone in cold blood sickened him to the core. Even a notorious coldheart leader and his right-hand man, both of whose hands were drenched in the blood of hundreds, if the stories were halfway true.
But, despite the sensation the incident caused over the next few days with the debate whispered in workrooms and shouted in the cantina, once the coldhearts had returned to their boat and sailed back the way they came, lots of nothing happened. After a week the incident was forgotten.
* * *
T
HE
FIRST
THING
that penetrated Ricky’s brain was his father’s pleading voice. “Please, take whatever you want. But spare my family, at least!”
Sitting bolt upright in the next room, the little space he shared with his sister, Ricky realized that he’d been awakened by a gunshot when others popped in quick but ragged succession from several different directions.
People screamed.
He heard strange, quiet laughter, like a snake among leaves. “We’ll take what we want no matter what, little man. But we came for your miserable lives. You dared to defy El Guapo and now must serve as lesson for everyone.”
Ricky heard his mother’s voice rise in a scream. It was cut off abruptly with a meaty, moist thud.
He flung himself up from his woven-straw pallet. As he ran for the warped plywood door, he heard a strange drawn-out gurgle. And then the unmistakable shrieks of his adored sister, Yamile.
He burst into the store’s main room. A horrific tableau froze him in his tracks. Ricky’s mother lay sprawled facedown on the planks in a pool of blood. By the front door, two bearded men held his father’s arms as the huge shark-headed mutie, Tiburón, slowly shoved a machete into his belly.
Yamile writhed in the grip of another big intruder, holding her off the floor in a bear hug from behind. A fifth man was falling with one hand clapped to a pair of scissors buried to the grips at the junction of neck and chest. A pulsing red rope of blood arched between his futile fingers.
“Bitch!” snarled the man who held Yamile.
“Don’t hurt her!” Tiburón snapped without turning. “She goes straight to El Guapo.”
Without waiting for his sister’s captor to respond, Ricky grabbed the nearest item off a nearby shelf and sprang at the intruder. He threw it, a quart jar of some sort of preserves. It struck the man in the forehead.
The man’s eyes rolled up and his head snapped back. Yamile whipped her own head back, catching him under the chin and making his knees wobble. Then, slamming her bare heel up into his balls, she broke free and darted for the door.
“Run, Yami!” Ricky shouted. He jumped on her tormentor’s back and grabbed him around the neck, trying for a choke hold. But even with the man half-stunned and with the breath blown out of him by the nut shot, it was like trying to wrestle an angry bear.
“Idiots,” Tiburón roared. He drove the huge knife to the guardless hilt in José Morales’s belly and twisted. Ricky’s father screamed shrilly as his intestines flopped around his legs onto the floor of the store to which he’d devoted his life.
“Fucking incompetents,” Tiburón raged. “Stop her, or I’ll do worse to you than I did to this prick!”
With Ricky’s father now thrashing on the floor, his kicking legs getting steadily more entangled in the slippery loops of his own guts, the pair who’d been holding his arms raced after Yamile. One tackled her across the threshold. The other landed on top of her.
“Don’t hurt her, either, you idiots,” Tiburón roared. “Oh, fuck me, I have to do everything myself.”
Ricky still clung to the other man’s back. Despairing of ever getting a stranglehold around the tree-trunk throat, he hung on with one arm and clawed for the man’s eyes with the other. The man batted ineffectually at him, unable to bring his greater strength to bear against a foe clinging to his back like an angry monkey. Instead he teetered in circles, howling as if it were
his
big belly that had been ripped open.
A blur of motion caught the corner of Ricky’s eye. Tiburón had carried a longblaster slung over his muscle-wedge back. Now, as his goon swung the boy toward him, he was slamming the steel-shod butt at Ricky’s face.
Ricky turned his face aside, and the blow crashed into his temple. Red sparks exploded through his skull, and then a sort of black cloud swam up between him and his senses.
He was aware of falling to the floor. It seemed as if he felt it, somehow, at long distance, like hearing faint voices from far away. When he finally hit, he scarcely felt the impact, although he distinctly noticed that his body bounce-flopped three times.
Through the roiling nausea in his belly, he heard voices, growling and distorted.
“—got the slut, Tiburón,” a man was saying. “What about the brat? He’s a little undersized, but looks like he’s old enough to draft.”
“We need more blaster fodder,” a second voice said. It was strained with effort. Ricky sensed vaguely it belonged to the coldheart who’d recaptured his sister.
His blood sizzled with the need to rise up and help her, but he couldn’t make his limbs respond to his will. No matter how fiercely he tried.