Chuck Logan - The Price of Blood

Deep in his own bones he began to hear the whispers of childhood.

Our father, who art in Heaven …

He looked up. Great damn stars. He didn’t recognize any of them. His torn tennis shoe slipped off the shovel and he almost fell. Stumble-footed. He kicked at the empty plastic bottles. They bumped and staggered like sleepwalkers.

Too done in to do the work. Out of time.

Trin read their fatigue. “We must finish what we started,” he panted. Nina fell to her knees and yanked at her T-shirt. Sodden with sweat and wet sand, it interfered with her movement. She tore at the cloth, ripping a two-foot piece above the hem. Freer in the abbreviated shirt she wiped her face with the ripped cloth. Trin extended his hand for the rag. She threw it at him. He wiped sweat from his face and then handed it to Broker. “We work slow and steady,” Trin insisted.

Nina glared at Trin. A copper wraith, her bare stomach was coated with a sugar of sand and sweat. She sucked in a harsh breath and spat, “How could you deal with them?”

Trin’s smile was pure gook insane. “If we finish the work we live. That’s the deal. Now don’t quit on me!” he snarled at her.

“Fuck you,” she hissed and drove her shovel into the sand. Trin smiled. A Vietnamese smile. Two thousand years old. Broker tried to decipher the expression on the short man’s square face. He was keeping them going.

And so they dug with a new bizarre agenda within the grim prospect that waited. They would not fall down on the job. A credo Broker was raised with. He was a machine stuffed full of bullets. The bullets popped out as sweat.

Six feet into the pit. Even with the already loosened sand from their previous labors, Broker’s arms burned with every lift of the shovel. Each time it became harder to clear the lip of the hole. Nina’s breath was a dry rattle.

Scoop, swing, toss.

Trin’s shovel stabbed into wood with a hollow thunk. Again.

Loose ingots appeared haphazardly, as brilliant in the electric light as details from a Van Gogh. Must have spilled them in their haste their first time in this goddamn hole. Nina cradled one of them in her hands like a small flat loaf of bread. She put the bar down and touched the moldy webbing of the cargo sling that twisted around the pallet. The sling had not been treated with preservative and it crumbled in her hand.

One by one Broker heaved the gold ingots up into the night, twenty, thirty of them.

A flurry of flashlight beams played above the pit. LaPorte and his crew still stayed back, wary of their imagined booby trap. But they were no longer silent. The night animated with their excited voices.

“We’ve hit the pallet. We’re taking a break,” Broker yelled, throwing down his shovel and collapsing in the sand.

“That’s fair. We’re sending over some food.” LaPorte’s voice sounded in the night. His reasonable, collector’s voice. Trin slowly climbed to get it.

He scrambled back down into the pit with a handful of candy bars, energy bars, some donuts, and more water bottles. They squatted like cave dwellers, tearing at the cellophane wrappers with hooked grave-digger fingers. Broker chewed sand along with mouthfuls of an energy bar. Trin bent over a wrapper near one of the lights: brain-dead, he read the list of ingredients.

Nina averted her eyes from this weird normal moment and chewed methodically. Sand cascaded into the pit. Looking up, they saw Bevode’s shadow loom over them, outlined against the stars, catching enough spill from the lanterns to define the leer on his face.

In leisurely stages, Bevode unzipped his fly and eased out his dick. For a long time he massaged himself pleasurably and then he let a thick stream of urine splatter down. The piss steadied in one spot and splashed on the wooden lid of one of the ammo boxes.

“Break’s over,” said Bevode. He zipped his pants and slowly uncoiled his bullwhip.

The year 2000 was five years away and Broker was building the pyramids in reverse, in the dark. Cyrus’s pyramid.

Grunt and heave. His leg muscles coiled and nearly cracked. He was growing into his injured thumb. His thumb screamed as he dragged a box up the long sand ramp that Trin had stamped and shoveled into the side of the pit.

He had lost track of time since the leather eye of the whip started watching him in the night. He was bleeding from the right shoulder now, where the whip saw something it didn’t like. Just him and the whip and the ramp and the Imperial weight of Ming Mang’s gold.

Long fucking way up that ramp. Rope handles on the ammo boxes. Like a wire brush, stiff with tar. Ripped his hands. He’d torn the pockets from his pants and tried to use the blood-stained tatters as makeshift gloves. Trin was barechested, his sweaty torso muscled like a bantamweight. Lost his tiger tooth? He’d torn his shirt up and shared it with Nina to use on the cutting ropes.

Broker stared at the ammo crate. Weighed anywhere from a hundred to two hundred pounds apiece. The rough wooden box had waited twenty years in its chrysalis of sand for him. This must be what slavery was like. Suffering doled out one drop of sweat at a time. Gimme water, gimme rest, gimme food, gimme another hour…

History was turning backward in the pit.

It’s a wheel. No wheels on the sand ramp though. Just muscle. And all his muscles were braced-not just with the obstinate weight of the box. With anticipation.

For the whip.

He cleared the top of the pit and the benediction of the sea breeze made his sweat sing. Up here in the fresh air there was organization. Purpose. A future.

Men who owned the future stood with guns. And a whip. Making plans. They had a system. Broker, Nina, and Trin dragged the boxes up the ramp and another twenty yards down the beach. LaPorte had decided this was the danger close zone. If there was an explosive device in the pit they should be protected by the walls of the hole and the distance. In teams of three, the crippled vets were hitched to the boxes and dragged them to the surf. Trung Si and the other three struggled with the boxes and loaded them into the dinghy.

Hire the handicapped.

Broker dropped the rope handle and plodded back toward the pit. Nina’s head inched up, then her corded shoulders and arms appeared, straining at the terrible weight. Couldn’t look her in the eye. Hadn’t been able to for hours. Supposed to protect her.

“Don’t be eyeballing that woman,” shouted Bevode. The whip winked with a leather hiss. A light, flesh-clipping butterfly kiss on the shoulder blade.

“Bevode,” chided Cyrus LaPorte. He sat in a chair, at the folding camp table, near the waterline. He was reading a copy of USA Today by the light of a battery bar. He was drinking fresh-brewed coffee. A dinghy brought it on a return trip from the boat. Broker could smell it. For the next hour all he could think about was the smell of coffee.

In the morning.

Because morning was coming. The texture of the dark had changed. From drenched canvas to velvet to gauze.

The pit had started to look familiar, like an apartment they lived in and were remodeling. Broker lurched back down the ramp. Every time they dragged a box their bleeding hands left a little trail. He winced when he heard the whip crack. Bevode’s voice gloated in an epiphany of power and contempt. “C’mon, you split-tail nigger; tote that bale, bitch.”

Trin met him halfway up the ramp, struggling with another box. No one had spoken for hours. What was the use? Trin continued to struggle on. Steady. Determined. With what? Nothing left.

After hours on the ramp it had become familiar. A routine. Broker dropped to his knees and blinked. But now the remaining boxes were countable. A finite number. Six of them. He saw the rotting wood of the pallet base protrude from the sand. What was it Jimmy said. How many words…