Authors: Warren Hammond
Deluski pushed Josephs’s knee with his shoe. “Remind me why we brought him along, Maggie?”
“He told me he wanted to stay involved.” I could hear the shrug in her voice.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. The boat captain pointed to a cluster of lights up ahead. Yepala.
* * *
After jumping ashore to join Maggie and Deluski, I stretched a sore back. Long fucking trip. I checked the time: late afternoon, almost true night.
The charter boat captain aimed a pole at Josephs’s slumped form. “What am I supposed to do with your friend?” Josephs’s conked head hung straight back, mouth open like he wanted to catch raindrops. One hand was draped overboard, a couple fingers dipped in the water.
“Let him sleep it off. If he wakes up, tell him to stay on board. You make it real clear, he goes to a bar we’ll ditch his ass.”
The captain used the pole to push off and revved the motor, the boat powering toward a collection of pilings jutting from the water where he’d tie up and wait for our return.
I took the lead up a narrow trail through a tangle of jungle, keeping to the boards embedded in the mud. Dim lights were strung overhead, and the air was ripe with damp peat. Fronds brushed my arms. Leaves dragged over my hair. I lifted a shoe, pinned a thorny shoot to the ground, and waited for Maggie and Deluski to pass before forging forward.
The jungle opened onto the street. Yepala unfolded on either side, squat buildings facing a rutted road. A motorbike putted by, mom, dad, three kids and a baby heaped on top.
We looked at one another, the same questioning faces all around. Now what?
We turned right—why the fuck not?—and passed in front of a market, blue tarps stretched over tables of piled fruit and spice. Chickens and ’guanas squawked inside cages hanging above butcher blocks. I recognized the market from some of Mota’s pictures. He’d spent a lot of time here.
“You need a guide?” I looked down at the voice. A young girl, ten, maybe twelve, pinned-back hair, grunge-stained pants, jellies on her feet with dirt-blackened toes poking through the cracked plastic.
“You know an offworlder with long hair? Says he’s a doctor.”
She put a finger on her cheek, drew a circle. “Snakes?”
I nodded.
“He has a clinic in the jungle. He comes into town sometimes. I can take you.”
Just at that moment, an older boy came out from the market and stepped in front of her. “I know the way. Half hour on foot.”
The girl slipped around him, wedged herself between us. “I saw them first!”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and tossed her to the side. “Come, I’ll take you.”
She threw a punch, fist bouncing off his arm, her follow-up swing catching him in the ribs.
I liked her already.
“Cut it out.” He geared up to give her another shove.
I put my hand on his shoulder. “She asked us first.”
“But—”
I squeezed down, fingers digging in, words slowing. “We have our guide.”
He backed up and ducked out of my grasp. “Don’t fucking touch me!”
I took an aggressive step his way, and he darted off.
The girl stood tall, posture proudly erect. “Are you cops?”
Were we that obvious? “Why do you think that?”
“Some cops from Koba come to visit the doctor a lot.”
“Do you know their names?”
“No, but one of them has a big scar.” She drew a line across her forehead.
Wu.
“How many cops?”
“There’s the one with the scar, and then there’s the bald one with the same snake tattoo. And sometimes they come with a captain.”
Wu. Froelich. Mota.
“What do they do here?”
“They go out to the doctor’s to get a cask they take home to Koba.”
“What kind of cask? The kind they put brandy in?”
She nodded.
“Do you know what’s inside these casks?”
“No.”
“So how do we get to the doctor’s clinic?”
“If you want to pay for a car, we can drive halfway, but the hills get too steep after that. Too muddy after it rains. Or we can walk the whole thing.”
I exchanged glances with my traveling partners.
Maggie bent down to the girl’s eye level. “What’s your name?”
“Evangeline, but everybody calls me Evie.”
“Okay, Evie, I think we’d rather walk. It’ll do us good after that boat ride.” She didn’t mention that we wanted to make a silent approach. Our goal was simple: figure out what the hell was going on up here and go home. No confrontation. Not here.
Evie started down the street, and we fell in line—me in back—keeping to the narrow channels between puddles and clumpy mud. I took a look over my shoulder and scanned the sparsely lit street for a panama hat. This was his turf.
Warlord territory.
We strode past food counters and refurbed tech shops, a clothing store with broken mannequins in the window, amputees sporting sundresses. Somebody called to us. I spotted him up ahead, sitting on a tire, trying to wave us down: a beggar in rags.
I looked away. If you don’t want to give, you don’t make eye contact.
I heard him call again and chanced another glance his way. He was off the tire now, crab-walking. Something wasn’t right about him, the way he moved, crawling backward, his head twisted uncomfortably around so he could see where he was going. Curiosity got the better of me. I stopped and pulled a bill from my pocket and waited for him, his out-of-whack crab-walk striking a freaky chord inside me.
He came closer, his bare feet too short, toes too long. What the fuck? Hands. I realized they were hands.
I bent over and held out the money, waiting for one of his four hands to come off the ground and take it. Something snaked around the bill, wrapped it up tight and pulled it from my fingers. I jumped back, heart kicking. What the hell was that?
He smiled and laughed softly as he crabbed away, the money held up high with his tail.
“Juno,” Deluski called. “You better get up here.”
My legs obeyed and started moving to catch up, my gaze slow to unlock from the beggar.
What are you?
I stumbled over a clod of mud and forced my attention forward. Evie was standing next to another young boy with a lase-rifle hanging across his chest. Maggie and Deluski faced them, Maggie digging into her wallet. “He wants money.”
“Who is he?”
Evie said, “You have to pay to leave town to the north.”
The kid waited with crossed arms, one elbow resting on the weapon’s butt, the other on the barrel. His shirtsleeves were cut off, a scar tattoo of the letter
Z
raised on his arm, the scar tissue too perfectly lined to be made by anything other than a branding iron. I looked left, through the open window of a dance hall. Music played loudly, and a dozen armed boys sat at long tables with longer stares.
A pair of boys not much older than Evie came out squaring berets on their heads. General Z’s soldiers. They joined ranks with the first boy.
Maggie handed the kid a bill. He looked at the denomination and shook his head. Maggie added a second. And a third. He still shook his head.
Maggie pulled out yet another bill but Evie stopped her. “That’s enough.”
The soldier boy stayed where he was. Hand out. Waiting for more. Evie took his hand, closed his fingers around the money, and told him to quit. She put her hands on his hip and pushed. He resisted with a straight face and rigid body. She drove with her legs until he finally tipped. He caught his balance and swung the gun around. “I want more money!”
We froze. Maggie, Deluski, and I were caught in the sights of a pubescent punk playing soldier.
Evie took Maggie’s hand and told her to come. “You paid enough. He’s just playin’.”
Didn’t look like he was playing.
Evie pulled Maggie’s arm, “C’mon.” Maggie took a tentative step, and another, me and Deluski following in her cautious footsteps. I felt an uneasy sickness in my chest. We were foreigners here. Didn’t know the players, didn’t know the rules. Foreigners.
Another beggar approached, this one a child, a protruding bump under his shirt, head shaved bald with some kind of input jack embedded in the center.
Christ.
Where the fuck were we?
My head swam, anxiety creeping up from my chest and settling around my throat. I pulled the lase-blade handle tucked into my belt, held it tight in my fingers, thumb perched on the button. Deluski paused for a moment to give the kid some money, put it in the kid’s pincer-claw hand.
With my nerves now on razors, I kept moving, eyes bouncing left and right, watching, waiting for the next mind fuck. An occasional truck passed, workers standing upright in the truck bed, their clothes stained from a grueling day in the poppy fields. We passed homes with barred windows, guards sitting out front, resting on tipped-back chairs, weapons slung from their shoulders, glum frowns slung from their chins.
We reached the edge of town, the last streetlight falling behind us, the pitch black darkness a relief to my overloaded senses. Maggie passed her flashlight to our guide. To me she asked, “Can you see all right back there?”
I kept my eyes aimed up ahead, where Evie and Deluski lit the way. “I’m good.”
* * *
We crunched our way up the trail, weeds and dead branches snapping underfoot. We’d ditched the road as soon as we’d left town. Told Evie we didn’t want to be seen, asked her if there was a back way.
The jungle trail was rough going. According to Evie, it wasn’t used much, not since the road was built. We tripped through vines and scrub, my lase-blade slicing through the worst. We tramped through streams, pushed through brambles. My thorn-scratched, bug-bitten skin itched in a thousand places. Bug spray didn’t do shit in deep jungle.
The unmistakable roar of a flyer sounded up ahead. We were close. I covered my ears as the grumbling bellow passed overhead, foliage whipping in the wind. I dumbly looked up, caught a shower of sappy detritus in my hair, my eyes, down my shirt. I coughed and spat, shook shit out of my shirt.
Flashlights and laughter, both aimed at me.
I wiped my face with my empty sleeve. A too rare smile broke on my face as I had a good laugh at myself, first time since forever ago. Evie and Maggie brushed flakes of I-didn’t-know-what out of my hair while I winced against the pain of my burned scalp.
On the move again, Evie led the way until the bush finally thinned and opened onto an open field, where a pair of lamp poles dropped cones of light on a broad swath of poppies. We stayed low, flashlights off, watching for activity.
A building sat in the middle of the field, surrounded by several shacks. A two-wheeled track led to the road we’d avoided. A sizable group of people worked the far side of the field, canisters on their backs, sprayers in hand, rags tied over their mouths.
I scanned for guards, scoped five in total, two monitoring the workers, three more patrolling near the main building, a two-story structure constructed of slats and poles under an open-air thatch roof.
I asked Evie, “Is that General Z’s headquarters?”
“This ain’t no headquarters.” She laughed. “It’s just the doc’s clinic. Z runs whole villages up north. I portered a trip up there once.”
“You’re a porter?”
“My cousin is. He took me along as more of a runner. I don’t eat much so it don’t cost much to bring me.”
“Ever seen General Z?”
She nodded. “He comes to Yepala sometimes to meet with his lieutenants and the sheriff.”
“Who is the sheriff?”
“Carlos Aceves. He’s a mean man. You watch out for him. He always wears a panama hat. He and the doctor are friends, which is why he lets the doctor have his clinic here.”
“What kind of clinic is it?” asked Deluski.
She didn’t have an answer for that.
Maggie took a seat in the weeds. “That flyer we heard heading south—think the doctor was on it?”
“Probably. He’s always going back and forth to Koba.”
I dropped down next to Maggie. Might take awhile for that last group of workers to call it quits. According to Evie, they’d walk the road until they passed the mud, to meet a truck that could take them the rest of the way back to town.
Deluski and Evie sat down, Evie right next to Maggie. “Can I see your earrings?” Her tough-girl voice had been replaced by something softer and sweeter.
Maggie pulled them out of her ears and passed them to Evie, who held them low to the ground before turning on a flashlight. “They’re real pretty. Is that gold?”
“Yes.”
“What about the stones?”
“Emeralds.”
“They match your eyes. How’d they get so green?”
“They’re not my original eyes. I was born with brown eyes, just like you.”
Evie hung the earrings on a branching weed and studied how they dangled.
I turned my attention to the poppy field. Slowly, the workers peeled off, dropping their spray cans at one of the sheds and heading for the two-track road where a small gathering formed.
Evie took the earrings off the weed hanger and made to give them back but Maggie put up a hand. “You can keep them.”
“No. They’re too nice.”
“The way you’ve helped us, you deserve something nice.”
Evie forced them into Maggie’s hand. “Somebody would try to steal them by cutting off my ears.” Tough girl was back.
Workers continued to quit, my heart rate climbing as they did. Sneaking in there was going to be tough. Too much open space, and too many guards.
The last few workers headed in, the field lights flicking off right afterward. The compound, however, was still bathed in yellow as workers started to file down the road.
As a group, we moved into the poppy field and slowly started across. The deep dark made it difficult to pick our way through ragged rows of poppy plants, black leaves and stems and pods reaching up from blacker earth. We detoured around the lamp poles, afraid somebody would turn them back on.
Maggie whispered, “This is as far as you go, Evie.”
I counted off some bills for her. “First sign of trouble, you go back the way you came.”
“Got it.”
We crept forward. Only three guards left. The other two were escorting the workers down the road.