Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

But just then Meredith jumped to her feet. She made a move to rush to me where I was lying on the floor. I think she was going to throw herself between me and the bullet. But she never got the chance. Instead of shooting me, Mendoza pulled his pistol back as if he were going to smack her in the head with it.

This time it was Pastor Ron who stopped him. He got between him and Meredith and grabbed Meredith by the shoulders. He pushed her away from me and away from Mendoza. He settled her back into her chair, murmuring something to her I couldn’t hear.

Breathing hard, the pistol still lifted in his hand, Mendoza turned back to me. I could see he was wild with rage. He still didn’t shoot me, though. He turned away. He started stalking around the room, stomping here and there as if he weren’t sure which way to go. He started shouting at everyone, turning from side to side.

“Is there someone else? Eh? Someone else who wishes to defy me? Do you want to see what happens? Do you want to have a conversation about it? You will have a conversation with a bullet, I tell you. Who wants to?”

He stopped. His back was to me. He seemed to have settled on a target for his wrath.

“What about you, Señor Dunn?” he asked. “Do you have something to say to me? Eh? What do you have to say?”

There was a pause. I couldn’t see Palmer from where I was lying. I couldn’t really see anyone, curled up on the floor as I was with my arms wrapped around my throbbing stomach and blood dripping down from my forehead into my eye. But I heard Palmer’s voice, all right. He sounded—well, he sounded exactly the same as he sounded before. It was exasperating. He still was all cool and comical—as if he didn’t have a care in the world—definitely as if he didn’t care about what happened to me or Meredith or any of the others.

“You’re a tough guy, Mendoza,” he drawled in that sardonic way of his. “For a minute there, I wasn’t sure you and your four gunmen were going to be able to take that teenager. But you took him, all right. You surely did. Mucho macho, amigo. I salute you.”

I managed to lift my head up from the floor a little and got a better look at Mendoza where he was standing in the center of the cantina, facing Palmer, his back to me, his gun hand by his side. I saw his shoulders rise and fall as he breathed heavily in his rage.

Then he looked around him. He seemed to be at a loss—not knowing whom he should scream at next. Then he waved his gun in the air and shouted orders in Spanish.

Every time he did that, my guts turned to water: I didn’t understand the words. He could have been saying, Open fire or Kill them all . I didn’t know whether in the next moment the gunmen would spray the room with bullets.

But no—not yet.

Someone—one of the gunmen—grabbed the back of my collar. I felt myself choking as he pulled up on me, trying to haul me to my feet. I worked desperately to get my legs under me before he strangled me. My legs were weak and wobbly— but somehow I managed to stand.

The gunman who had me in his grip gave me a hard push. I stumbled across the room toward the bar where Palmer was standing. I staggered into the bar and hurt, dazed, dizzy, I started to fall again. Palmer grabbed my arm roughly and steadied me on my feet.

Breathing hard, leaning against the bar, I looked around and saw the others: Pastor Ron and Meredith and Nicki and Jim. The gunmen were standing over them, shouting at them, waving their machine guns in their faces, forcing all of them out of their chairs to their feet.

Now they were prodding them with their gun barrels, herding them toward the bar, toward where I was standing with Palmer. My head thick with pain and my eyes still blurring with tears, I saw my friends’ faces as they hurried in front of the relentless guns. Nicki was weeping, her legs so weak under her she could barely walk. Meredith stood uncannily straight, her face uncannily still as she kept her arm around Nicki’s shoulders, holding her as steady as she could as they were both jostled forward. Pastor Ron seemed dazed, in shock, his face blank, his eyes blinking rapidly behind his glasses as he stumbled toward me. Jim had his hands up in the air like a guy being robbed. He kept saying, “Okay, okay, I get it,” as the gunmen pushed and prodded him—pushed and prodded all of them—with the barrels of their weapons.

Finally, we were all huddled together against the bar. Again, I thought this might be it, might be the end. I stood there helpless and dazed and bent over in pain, waiting for the gunfire to begin. I prayed God would comfort my parents, but I didn’t know how much comfort they would ever find.

Mendoza stood in the center of the cantina and looked at us—a black look, his eyes murderous.

“Lock them up!” he shouted.

The next few moments were a terrifying chaos. The gunmen rushed toward us, shouting gruffly in Spanish, prodding us in our backs with their gun barrels, striking at our heads with their fists and open hands. Our backpacks— everything we had—were left piled up in a corner of the cantina as they forced us out of the room, out the back entrance, into a dark hall. I saw Palmer Dunn up in front of me, moving at a quick but steady walk, keeping ahead of the blows. But the rest of us were all bunched together, and though I knew there were only four gunmen, they seemed to be everywhere, on every side of us. Their shouts engulfed me. My fear and pain engulfed me. I staggered along, hardly knowing where I was.

Now there was a staircase. Now we were being chased up the stairs. I heard Nicki wailing like a lost child. I heard Jim saying, “Okay, okay, okay,” over and over again. I stumbled and went down, cracking my shin against a riser. The next moment I was struck on the side of the head—by a fist or a gun butt, I’m not sure which. Panicked, I scrabbled to my feet, leapt forward, stumbled again, nearly fell again, but finally made my way up, following the feet of Pastor Ron above me.

Another hall. More running. More shouting. More blows. I was beginning to feel sick. My stomach, aching from Mendoza’s kicks, was churning and turning. I know it sounds funny under the circumstances—I mean, the circumstances being we were probably all about to be killed—but I had this terrible fear that I was going to throw up and humiliate myself in front of Meredith. I guess that wasn’t the way I wanted to spend my last minutes on earth.

The next thing I knew, I saw an open door in front of me. We were being pushed through it so fast that we all sort of collided together. I remember my shoulder went into Pastor Ron and I was jostled aside and hit the wall. Then Pastor Ron went through the door and one of the gunmen shoved me through it after him.

Through blood and tears, through the whirling confusion in my head, I saw a room—one of the rooms in the hotel above the cantina. I saw a window and a wooden bed and a bureau with a mirror on it. I saw the dim yellow light in the ceiling, a bulb protected by a frosted glass globe that was dark with the bodies of the dead insects trapped inside.

I saw it all swirling and turning around me. And then— it was as if the world were a video and someone slowly turned down the volume, then snapped it off—everything seemed to grow dim and distant.

Then it was gone.

I had lost consciousness, I guess.

I opened my eyes. The first thing I saw was Meredith. A sweet sight: her face looking down at me. Her pale eyes were so clear, her face so calm, her smile so gentle, I thought everything that had just happened must’ve been some kind of dream. Really, that’s what I thought—I thought maybe I got sick or something, had a fever, you know, and had this whole elaborate hallucination about how we were going home and suddenly people were shooting people and beating me up and… it couldn’t have happened that way! Meredith wouldn’t be smiling down at me like that, wouldn’t look so calm, if it had happened that way.