Richard Morgan - Black Man / Thirteen

“And the feeds?” Carl asked him. “The press?”

Norton snorted. “Oh, the press . Don’t make me fucking laugh.”

Carl came back to the table and stood staring out of the observation port. Up and down the lines of traffic, breath frosted from the mouths of uniformed immigration officers as they moved briskly about in the chilled desert night, bending and peering into vehicles at random with long tubular steel flashlights raised to the shoulder like some kind of mini bazooka. The queues stretched all the way back to the bridge, where Interstate 10 came across the Colorado River from Arizona under a frenzy of LCLS and wandering spotbeams. The prickly, piled-up fortifications around the bridge were blasted into black silhouette by the light.

“Come on, Suerte,” he muttered. “Where the fuck are you?”

There were two armed guards hanging about at the far side of the suspension bridge in the canyon, both of them bored to distraction, yawning and cold, weapons slung. One, the younger of the two, a lad barely out of his teens called Lucho Acosta, sat on a rock where the path began again, tossing pebbles idly out into the river. His somewhat older companion was still on his feet but propped casually back against the rope cabling on one side of the bridge, smoking a handmade cigarette and tipping his head back occasionally to look up out of the canyon at the sky. Miguel Cafferata was sick of this gig, sick of being buried down here a day’s hard drive from the lights of Arequipa and his family, sick of the chafing bulk of the weblar jacket, slimline though it was supposed to be, and sick of Lucho who didn’t seem to have a single interest in life outside soccer and porn. Miguel had the depressing sense when he spent time with the boy that he was looking at a premonition of his own son ten years hence, and the impression was making him irritable. When Lucho got to his feet and pointed upward to the path, he barely bothered following the gesture.

“Mules coming down.”

“Yeah, so I see.”

Conversation was exhausted between the two of them. They’d both been on the same duty every day for the last two or three weeks, the same dawn-to-midafternoon shift. The boss was twitchy; he wanted the place locked down tight, no unnecessary changing of the guard. The two of them watched in silence as the solitary figure and the two mules picked their way down the concertina turns of the path in the early-morning sun. It was a common enough sight, and anyway, you couldn’t be surprised down here in daylight, except maybe by snipers or a fucking airstrike.

Even when the mule driver and his animals made it onto the last few hairpin twists before the bridge, Miguel didn’t tense as such. But a flicker of interest woke on his weathered face. Behind him, he heard Lucho get to his feet off the rock.

“Isn’t that Sumariva’s mule, leading?”

Miguel shaded his eyes. “Looks like it. But that sure isn’t Sumariva. Way too big. And look at the way he’s walking.”

It was a fair comment. The tall figure clearly didn’t have the hang of coming down a mountain path. He jolted heavily, scudding up powdery white dust every couple of steps. Seemed to be walking with a limp, too, and he didn’t appear to have much idea of how to lead the mules. Big, modern boots and a long coat plastered with the dust of his ungainly descent, battered leather Stetson. Beneath the brim of the hat, a face flashed pale. Miguel grunted.

“It’s a fucking gringo,” he said curiously.

“You think…”

“Don’t know. Supposed to be looking out for some black guy, not a gringo and a couple of mules. Maybe this is someone from the university. A lot of those guys are from the north, doing survey experiments down here for Mars. Testing equipment.”

The mules did appear, now that he looked, to be loaded with small, shallow-draft crates that winked metallic in the high-angled slant of the sun.

“Well, he ain’t fucking testing it around here,” said Lucho, unshipping his shotgun with a youthful glower. He pumped a round into the chamber and stepped onto the bridge planking. Miguel winced wearily at the sound.

“Just let him come to us, all right? No sense rushing up to meet him, and there’s no space to do a search on that side anyway. Let him get across to this side, then we’ll see who he is, turn him around, and send him on his way.”

But when the gringo got to the bridge, he didn’t come out onto the planks immediately. Instead he stopped and sent one of the mules across ahead of him. The animal made the crossing with accustomed docility, while back on the other side the gringo in the hat seemed more concerned with searching his pockets and fiddling with the webbing straps across the other animal’s back.

“This is Sumariva’s mule,” Lucho said as the animal clopped solemnly up to them, then past and onto the solid ground of the riverbank, where it stood and waited for its owner to catch up. “You think he’d loan it out like that?”

“For enough cash, yeah. Wouldn’t you?” Miguel shifted to Spanish, raised his voice. “Hoy you, you can’t come down here. This is private property.”

The figure at the other end of the bridge waved an arm. The voice came back in Quechua. “Just give me a minute, will you.”

Then he started to lead the other mule out onto the bridge. Hat tilted down over his eyes.

“All right, you stay here,” Miguel told the boy. The language had floored him; he’d never met a gringo before who spoke it. “I’ll go see what this is about.”

“You want me to call it in?”

Miguel glanced at the mule standing there like the most ordinary thing in the world. It blinked back at him out of big liquid eyes. He grunted impatiently.

“Nah, don’t bother. Not like they won’t hear it if we have to shoot this guy.”

But he unslung his shotgun, and he went out to meet the new arrival with the vague crawl of unease in him. And he slowed as he closed the last few meters of the rapidly shrinking gap between himself and the advancing stranger. Came to a stop near the middle of the bridge, stood athwart, and pumped a round of his own into the shotgun in his hands.

The stranger stopped at the dry rack-clack of the action.

“That’ll do,” Miguel said, in Quechua. “Didn’t you hear me? This is private fucking property.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“So what the fuck are you doing down here, gringo?”

“I’m here to see the witch.”

That was when the stranger tipped up his head so Miguel could see his face properly. It was also when he realized he’d made a mistake. The white they’d seen flashing under the hat brim as he came down the path above was pasty and unreal, clotted and streaked on the face like a poorly applied clown’s mask or a half-melted Day of the Dead candy skull. The eyes were dark and impassive, and they stared out of the disintegrating white face with no more humanity than a pair of gun muzzles.

Pistaco.

Miguel had time for that single quailing thought, and then something erupted behind him in a string of firecracker fury. He locked up, tugged both ways at once, and the stranger’s long dusty coat split open and he had a flash glimpse of some stubby, ugly weapon cradled there in the pistaco ’s arms.

Deep, throat-clearing cough, spiteful shredding whine.

Then there was only impact, a sense of being tugged violently backward, a split second of the sky and Colca’s steep-angled sides tilting and spinning, and then everything was gone.

Carl Marsalis sprinted past the ruins of the first familia gunman, closed the gap with the second while the other man raised his shotgun and snapped off a useless blast from the hip. This one was already panicked beyond any professional combat training he might have had, the remote-triggered firecrackers in the lead mule’s panniers, the sudden explosive death of his comrade. Carl ran in firing, too far out for the sharkpunch to have any serious impact yet, but the boy ahead of him flinched and staggered with the few shards that found their mark.