SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

“Compinche? Cómplice en crimen, you mean.”

Ren slid the heavy handgun into his belt, glancing over the countryside as the cork trees blew in a burst, settling as the wind died. “The whole town will thank us. All of them, afraid of their own shadows.”

“Yo no sé…”

He socked Óscar’s shoulder. “Hey, your stomach still growling?”

“¿Qué? It was my idea to try that neighborhood! You owe me for those cookies in your pocket. Don’t think I didn’t see you take them.”

Ren smirked as he flipped up his hood. “Come on, it’ll be a blast. You and me, the heroes of Ronda. Think of it as my birthday present. What’s the worst that can happen?”

Sweaty from their ride, the boys lay on the hillside, bicycles resting beside them as they stared into the valley. The baking sun had risen past midday, stretching the shadows of a nearby cork tree.

Beneath his hood, Ren squinted down the barrel of the gun, feeling uncaged and—for the first time in forever—full. Unable to eat another bite, he set the cookie down. They should hurry, he knew, find the medicine and return. Instead he imagined his mother and Hector in the aisles of the store, tallying foodstuffs. All the adults thought of—food and not dying. Never really about leaving, except to raid the pueblos. Gone for days, only to return empty-handed.

“Never been this far out of Ronda, have you?”

Óscar rolled onto his back and shook his head. With a smirk, Ren wiped the hair from his eyes and glanced down the gun sight to the opposite side of the vale, where the entrance to the cave cut the parallel slope like a gash in a sea of brown. A farmhouse squatted in the midst of the valley, flanked by a cropping of dead trees lacking the sense to fall over. Unlike most of the ruins in Ronda, the building appeared untouched after a decade of neglect.

Untouched by the last century , he thought. With sparse cloud cover, the temperature left him parched.

“Why don’t you admit it, Ren?” Óscar asked, as he stared at the sky. “You’re americano. Tu mamá is americana, that means you’re americano.”

Ren aimed, smiled wider at Óscar’s ignorance, and fired. The crack echoed through the valley, dinging the farmhouse a foot from a window. “Ri dic ulous. Do I suck or what?”

“Why not admit it?”

“Because I’m not.” Ren spun the chamber and—against better judgment—reached for another cookie. “My mom came from the States but I was born in Paris. I grew up on the highways between France and Spain. You, on the other hand”—he spoke between bites—“have been pueblerino since you were born.”

Óscar snorted and sat up. “Pueblerino,” he repeated, and grabbed the binoculars. Turning his cap backward, he stared past the farmhouse at the gravel trail climbing the hillside to an empty parking lot. Hewn steps led to the cave above. “Tu mamá comes from America, you’re americano. Don’t have the balls to be español.”

Ren’s grin faded as he stared at the cave. He did not keep many secrets from Óscar—they were the only two people in town younger than twenty-seven—yet no one in Ronda knew Jeanie was not his birth mother. Ren’s parents had died in Paris. Jeanie came from Seattle. The idea of revealing the true nature of their relationship left Ren feeling alone. Alone terrified him more than anything—the fear of waking up to discover his mother missing. Nightmares from youth, which sent him to sleep on her bedroom floor until she woke. She always held him until he settled. Even now. Another thing he wouldn’t tell Óscar.

Ren glanced at Óscar and forced a smile. He had lived in Ronda for almost a year before Hector allowed the boys to meet. Kept in La Ciudad under the watch of his mother. Their first meeting happened only after her nonstop cajoling bore fruit. Holding his hand as they stood outside the hotel, watching Óscar in his second-story window. Unable to keep still as they waited for Hector to bring him out. To this day, Ren remembered Hector’s rules.

Los chicos can fetch agua. After, they may play in my garden for one hour. No longer.

Ren slid the pistol into his belt. “You get raised by an American in France and move to Spain—see how you do,” he countered. “Besides, most people spoke English on the roads, like we’re speaking now.”

Óscar let out a raspberry. “Come on, Ren. Let’s see if the old Bruja is in that cave. If not, it’s us gathering wood until the sun sets.”

“Like I said, tu padre will be— hey ! Wait!”

Ren scrambled, grabbed his backpack and followed Óscar down the hillside. In the valley the wind sent a plume of fine black silt into the air—leftovers from the ejecta—and settled as storm clouds rolled in from the southwest.

He reached the shingled farmhouse first, grinning as he waited. Adrenaline surged through his system. Past a dilapidated fence and dank stream, the trail snaked up the hillside to the cave entrance. “Man, you’re slow. Like tortuga slow.”

“Tortuga?” Óscar wheezed as he leaned against the farmhouse. “Who just ate ten galletas?”

“Yeah? And how many Fantas did you drink?” Ren laughed as he pointed to the cave. “Cueva de la Pileta? What does that mean, anyway?”

Óscar shook his head. “Cave of the pool. The family who owned the caves used to do tours. Mi padre says there are real caveman drawings inside—fish, animals, made by el Cromañón.”

“Cro-Magnon?” Ren stepped forward. “No shit?”

“Neanderthals, too. But you’ll have to go slow for a change, if you can. Mi padre says sometimes the caves are so deep, you can fall and fall and…”

Óscar’s voice died as both boys turned to the farmhouse’s storm cellar doors.

Ren took an involuntary step back. A chill emanated from the shuttered basement, sending goose bumps along the back of his arms. As he stared hunger, rage, famine , flooded over him, thoughts scratching at the base of his skull like a mouse trying to escape a trap and—connection — delving further, an emptiness within the cellar, deep-walled and inescapable, a terrible yearning, hungry and weak, gnawing, always gnawing, awakened by their presence, the smell of sweet boy sweat and the thumpa, thumpa of two pumping hearts.

Ren gripped Óscar’s arm and they scrambled up the hillside to the cave, faces drained white, like the thing in the cellar had leached their lifeblood from afar.

The rusty gate stood wide open, beckoning the boys down a natural hallway so low they had to duck to enter. Inside the cavern’s first grotto, their heavy breathing echoed into the darkness. Óscar shivered in the chill. “Dios santo, Ren. Was that…?”

“You know it was.”

“A loner? But you said they were all dead. You said—”

“Probably can’t even walk anymore,” Ren replied. “Come on.”

One of them, Ren knew, shuddering as he squinted into the cave—the few who remember their past. Not like the moribund in the cities. Back in Paris, when his mom had brief radio communication with the Americas, she learned about monsters in the fog more horrible than the undying in Europe, spreading from a dead zone in Rio. A zone of silence, she called it, where evil issues from whatever fell from the stars, or woke up beneath the earth’s crust. Thankfully, the thing in the cellar felt decrepit—kept alive on dirt and worms.

“We should go back to town,” Óscar muttered. “Tell someone. Mi padre—”

“It’s still daylight,” Ren said, “we have plenty of time. Besides, what we need is to find that medicine. We tell them when we get back. They can burn the house, all I care.”