David Levien: City of the Sun

Paul felt the man atop him, lifting, driving sharp knees into his midsection. Paul struggled and rolled from side to side, but found his every movement checked by the man ’ s weight. The man rose up, the violence on his face making it piglike, and drove a punch down at Paul ’ s chin. A slight turn of his head at the last moment was all that saved Paul from having his jaw crushed. The punch still landed, though, causing Paul ’ s head to bounce off the floor and his vision to swim. Paul felt his breath choked off as the man jammed a forearm across his windpipe. Paul was utterly unable to move, as if a vise secured him to the floor. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jamie kicking his attacker in the side, but with no effect.

“Run, Jamie,” Paul said, or hoped he had managed to say aloud as he felt his strength slide away and his vision dim once again. He recognized unconsciousness and death coming at him from the near distance. He bucked his hips and clawed out in desperation, but to no avail. Then there was a thud, repeated, then repeated again. Paul felt it more than heard it, the basslike vibration coming through the man who was killing him and into his own body. The man relaxed over Paul, his body dead weight now, lurching forward and going slack.

Paul took in a huge gout of air and then, with a great effort, pushed the man off him and looked up to find Victor standing there, covered in blood.

“Victor?” Victor held the shotgun in bleeding hands and appeared to be missing a few fingers.

“ Yo lo necesito, ” Victor said through broken teeth, and held up the shotgun.

Paul nodded, took Jamie by the arm, and exited the room. Victor, standing above the fallen man, swung the door shut.

Paul and Jamie came upon Behr, bleeding and big-eyed, in the narrow hallway.

“My god,” Behr said at the sight of the boy he ’ d stared at a thousand times in photos. “Is he…?”

“We ’ re gonna go, Jamie,” Paul said. “Can you?”

“Yeah,” the boy answered.

“Can you, Frank?”

“Follow me,” Behr said, gathering himself and raising his handgun. They followed him down the hall and out through the carnage of the house. Furniture was turned over and broken in the main area. The smell of gunpowder and the thick copper stink of blood were in the air. There were bodies. Paul saw two dead dogs sprawled on opposite sides of the room. They encountered one last guard, who was in the process of stealing something from a lockbox. He might have been the night gate guard, though neither Behr nor Paul could be sure, having only seen him through binoculars. Behr leveled his handgun. The man looked up and then ran out through a back door at the sight of them.

The sound of one, then another, shotgun blast reached them from inside as they made the car. Behr looked to Paul and gripped his gun.

“Victor,” Paul said.

“Victor?”

Jamie slid into the back and Behr lunged into the passenger seat. Paul started the car and began to drive. He expected the crack of a bullet from some unseen guard to tear his head away at any moment.

“Get down,” he said to Jamie, who did, lying across the floor in the back. Behr slumped lower, too, kicking off a shoe and peeling off a sock, which he pressed against one of his wounds. Paul rooster-tailed the car out of the gate, which hung open and still abandoned. No shot came. Paul fought to control his breathing, his sides heaving for oxygen, overloaded with adrenaline. He spit up in his mouth and let it go out the window, not taking his foot off the accelerator. Tears slicked his face.

“Jamie, get up now. I need to see you.”

His boy, impossibly, appeared in the rearview mirror. Paul thought for a moment that he himself had been shot back in the house and he was dying, and this was his death-moment fantasy image. But the moment went on and on. Paul got control of the car. Jamie was really there. Paul flashed on Carol, waiting at home for him, for them, to return. In his mind burned an image, of her face exploding with light, a light he could barely remember, in the instant when she saw her son again. Paul reached back with a hand and Jamie took it.

The dirt road gave way to gravel, and finally they were on asphalt again. They merged onto the main route, joining other cars and large trucks heading north. Mexican wind blew in the open windows. A cordon of federales ’ cars passed them going southbound with lights and sirens rending the night. Paul glimpsed Jamie in the backseat, staring out the window, incomprehension and barrenness on his young man ’ s face. They used dirty T-shirts and what was left at the bottom of the water bottles to clean themselves up. Behr wrapped a shirt around his tattered forearm. They kept driving, looking out every window and then at one another. It wouldn ’ t be long now. They’d be at the border soon.