Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

“Yeah, I guess. Like that.”

“Except it wasn’t your cheek to turn, was it?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you hadn’t shot that guy—with his wife and his kids and his mom who loved him—he’d have thrown that grenade and killed every single one of us. Nicki. Jim. And your girlfriend Lady Liberty too.”

I looked away from him so he wouldn’t see me blushing. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

“I bet if you asked them, you’d find out they have moms too. Nicki and Jim. Meredith. They maybe all have moms.”

“Maybe even you,” I said.

“Well, let’s not jump to conclusions,” Palmer drawled.

I walked another moment in silence. It was a pretty miserable choice, you know. You either kill a guy or he kills your friends. Either the murderous rebels win or the murderous government. It was like the whole country was just one big series of bad choices.

“Back at the river,” Palmer said. “Back when the croc was coming at you, remember?”

“No,” I said. “I forgot. I always have so many crocodiles attacking me, they just sort of slip my mind.”

Palmer gave another laugh. But then he stopped laughing. He said, “You were ready to die there, weren’t you?”

“Not very.”

“Ready enough. You were ready to die so someone else could live.”

I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess. So?”

“So sometimes, in a war, you have to be willing to do even worse things than die—and to live with the consequences afterward.”

“But that stinks!” I burst out. “That just stinks!”

He sighed. “It does. That’s the truth. It stinks.”

“I just came here to build a wall! To build a school!”

“I know you did, kid.”

I was about to say more—to complain some more, basically— but just then, we heard the choppers again.

Palmer stopped, holding up his hand to bring the others to a stop behind us. I looked up, panning my eyes across the cloudless blue, looking for the source of the noise. At first I didn’t see a thing. There was just that stuttering thunder filling the air, seeming to come from everywhere at once, growing louder and louder. But when I saw Palmer looking off in the direction of the airfield, I picked out the black dots hovering against the morning sky.

Jim and Nicki and Meredith had joined us now.

“Do you think they’re coming for us?” asked Jim.

Palmer nodded vaguely as if he was only half listening. His eyes were scanning the territory and I knew he was looking for a way out. Meanwhile, the chopper noise got louder and the black machines got larger and more distinct as they flew our way.

“Shouldn’t we run? Shouldn’t we get away?” asked Nicki.

Palmer still didn’t answer for a moment as he looked around. But then he said, “Dump the guns.”

“What?” I asked.

“They’ve got us,” said Palmer. “Those choppers are just for backup. There must be trucks on the way too. Dump the guns and we’ll keep walking and tell them we’re just innocent tourists trying to get home.”

“But Mendoza must have been in contact with Santa Maria by now,” said Meredith. “They’ll know who we are.”

Palmer nodded. “Probably. But this is our only chance. If we try to run or fight here, they’ll just shoot us down.”

“And if they don’t believe we’re innocent tourists… ?” Jim asked.

“They’ll arrest us first—and then shoot us.”

“Great.”

“If you’ve got another option, let me know, ’cause I can’t think of one.”

Right, I thought. That’s Costa Verdes for you. Nothing but bad options .

I looked around. I spotted a small field of tall grass just to the left of the road.

“There?” I asked.

Palmer looked at it—nodded. He and I jogged quickly off the road to where the high grass grew. Palmer slung his machine gun and pistol and knife in there. I threw in my machine gun after it. Funny—after talking about how I didn’t like shooting people, I was sorry to let the weapon go. It had saved my life more than once—in the van and in the river too. I hadn’t realized it before, but just having it with me sort of made me feel safe. Without it, I felt sort of undressed, sort of vulnerable.

Unarmed, Palmer and I jogged back to the road. We all started walking again, just like before.

The choppers were already plainly visible in the near distance. They were coming on fast. Half a minute later the machines were right over us, making the air shudder with their rotors.

They didn’t fly by this time. They just hung up there above us. In each of them, there was a man with a machine gun sitting in the open door, looking down at us through dark sunglasses.

We stopped. Palmer shouted to make himself heard above the chopper noise. “Here come the rest of them,” he said.

I looked and sure enough, there was a cloud of dust on the road ahead.

My mouth went dry and my heart started beating faster. Trouble again. Danger again. Would there ever be an end to it? Would we ever get free from this nightmare country? Jim must’ve been thinking the same thing. His pale features turned even paler. Nicki clutched Meredith’s arm and her lip trembled, but she didn’t cry or scream or anything like that. In fact, she seemed to be working hard to keep herself under control. Meredith put her hand on Nicki’s hand.

We watched the road as the trucks burst out of the cloud and rolled on toward us. We could see now that the truck beds were filled with men. And all the men had guns. And all the guns were pointing straight at us.

You say you are tourists trying to get back to America?”

The choppers still hovered directly over us. The man had to shout to make himself heard.

He told us his name was Lieutenant Franco. He was a slick piece of work. A rotund man around thirty-five or so. He was wearing fatigues topped with a jaunty green beret pulled to one side on his pitch-black hair. He had a round face with small eyes—looked sort of like a mean elementary-school teacher. His attitude was arrogant and distant, as if he were looking down at us from a great height.

He was wearing a pistol on his hip, but he didn’t pull it on us. Well, he didn’t have to. He had ten men surrounding us, their machine guns leveled.

“We’ve got no quarrel with anyone,” Palmer said to him. “We just want to go home.”

Lieutenant Franco drew his thumb slowly across his lower lip. He studied each one of us, his eyes lingering a little on the girls. I held my breath. I couldn’t even hope he would believe us—just give us a lift to the airport and let us go back to the US. Nothing could ever be that easy in this country.

After a few moments, the lieutenant straightened. “I am under orders from President Cobar and the revolutionary council to bring all foreigners in for questioning,” he said. Even over the chopper noise, I could hear he spoke excellent English with only a slight accent. “You will be taken to the Central Prison until the council has decided what is to be done with you.”

Suddenly Jim spoke up, raising his voice boldly. “I would like to see President Cobar. If I could just speak to him for a moment, I believe I could make him understand…”

But Lieutenant Franco was no longer listening. He turned his back on Jim and shouted orders to his soldiers in Spanish, gesturing our way.

I felt a hand on my arm and glanced down to see Palmer gripping me. At first I didn’t know why, but in the next moment I understood.

Because in the next moment Nicki cried out. The soldiers had surrounded her and grabbed her by both arms. They grabbed Meredith too and started hauling the two girls toward one of the trucks. I realized with dread: they were going to separate us, girls from boys. My whole body tensed with the instinct to try to stop them, but Palmer’s hand on my arm kept me from reacting… which probably also kept me from getting shot on the spot.