Andrew Klavan - If We Survive

“Put it on the floor, Mendoza,” Palmer said now. He meant the pistol. “Slowly. Thumb and finger.”

Mendoza had regained a bit of his composure. He was relaxed again—or, that is, he was pretending to be relaxed in spite of the fury in his eyes. His hand went back to his belt. Slowly, he followed Palmer’s instructions.

“You are surrounded by guards and barbed wire,” he said as, using only his thumb and finger, he unbuckled his holster and drew out his gun. “You really think you can escape from here?”

“I think I can kill you in a split second if you don’t do what I tell you,” Palmer said.

Mendoza tried to snort at that, but his eyes were full of helplessness and anger. I knew how he felt. He dropped the pistol to the floor in front of him.

“Kick it over to the kid,” Palmer said, nodding at me.

Sneering with disdain, Mendoza kicked the pistol to me. I started to bend down to reach for it.

But Palmer said, “Not yet, kid. The fatigues. Put them on.”

For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I realized: he wanted me to undress the dead guard and put on his uniform.

“You want me to dress up as a guard?” I asked. “But my face… my hair…”

“It’s fine,” Palmer said quickly. “It’s not like in the hills. Plenty of Santa Marians are as pale-skinned as you are— especially now after the sun has been baking you for a week. Just cover as much of your hair as you can with the bandanna. Now do it. Fast.”

I knelt down next to the body. I thought back to how I’d had to strip the rifle off the gunman from the firing squad. I hadn’t wanted to touch a dead man then, and I didn’t want to do it now. But I guess I’d gotten a little practice in suspending the imagination since then. This time I just decided not to think about it, and I didn’t. I took the corpse’s clothes off as quickly as I could. I stripped out of mine. And a minute or two later I was wearing the khaki uniform of the revolution. Not a bad fit either. I tied the red bandanna around my forehead and pulled it up to hide my hair.

“Now pick up the pistol,” Palmer said. “Click off the safety.”

I didn’t know much about guns, and it took me a second to find the little switch he was talking about. But I found it.

“Now point the gun at Mendoza and if he moves, pull that little trigger gizmo on the bottom,” Palmer said.

I pointed the pistol at Mendoza, my finger on the trigger. Palmer leaned his rifle against the wall. He stooped down and started pulling the fatigues off the other dead guard.

Mendoza turned from him to me. He looked down at the pistol I had aimed at him. He smiled a condescending smile.

“You really think you have the courage to do it?” he asked.

I heard myself laugh—it was a crazy sound. But if he only knew how close I’d come to killing him with my bare hands, he wouldn’t have asked the question.

I guess he got his answer in my laughter, because his condescending smile disappeared. He turned away from me. He turned to Jim instead.

Jim was standing against the opposite wall. He looked as if he couldn’t comprehend what was happening. His lanky body had gone completely stiff. His face had gone completely blank. His bug-eyes were staring straight ahead—staring at nothing, as far as I could tell, just staring into space.

“And you,” Mendoza said to him. “You who know better than these others.”

Jim blinked. He shifted his stare from nothing to the rebel. “What?” he said in a distant voice.

“You are not a fool like they are. Not just some spoiled American. You understand the difficulties facing my country, my people.”

“Yes…,” said Jim, still as if he were very far away.

“Do you still wish to speak to the new president?” Mendoza asked him.

“I…,” said Jim.

“Because this can be arranged, you know. It is not too late. Fernandez Cobar is a great man, a great spirit, but he is always ready to listen to even the humblest petitioner.”

I heard Palmer chuckle at that as he stripped down, getting ready to change into the guard’s fatigues. “What a guy!” he muttered.

I went on pointing the pistol at Mendoza, barely listening to what he said, just watching for any sudden movements— half hoping, if you want the truth, that he would give me an excuse to pull the trigger.

Jim just went on staring at him. His mouth opened and closed. And then he said, “Who are you? Who are you people?”

Mendoza straightened a little as if with pride. “We are soldiers of justice,” he said. “You say you are familiar with President Cobar’s work. You should know this. We are soldiers of justice.”

Jim slowly shook his head, like a man coming out of a dream. “You were going to torture us. You were going to torture the girls. You said you were acting on direct orders of the president.”

Mendoza answered with a little shrug. “Do you think justice is easy? Do you think you can make things fair without using force? People are not equal by nature—you must compel them to be equal. President Cobar understands that if you want to build a better world, you must destroy all of those who stand in your way.”

“But… But… But…,” said Jim, slowly coming back to himself. “That’s not a better world. That’s this world. That’s the world we have already.”

Palmer chuckled again. “You can probably get some cash for those old Cobar books on e-Bay, Professor,” he said with a grin. “You can throw in your Che Guevara T-shirts while you’re at it.”

He was just buttoning up the khaki shirt. It was too small for him—it looked like it would rip open if he moved too fast—but I guessed if nobody looked too closely, he would pass for a rebel, same as me.

When he’d finished tying the red bandanna around his forehead, he put his hand out to me. I gave him the pistol. He held it on Mendoza while, with his free hand, he took the machine gun off the wall and tossed it my way. I caught it. Then, while I trained the rifle on Mendoza, Palmer shucked the magazine out of the pistol and popped out the shell in the chamber. He handed the empty gun back to Mendoza.

“Holster it,” he said.

Mendoza hesitated, glancing at me, at my gun. He didn’t like taking orders. But he didn’t have much choice. He slid the empty pistol back into its holster.

Palmer took a deep breath. He looked at Jim. He looked at me.

“All right, boys,” he drawled in that ironic way of his. “I think we better go rescue Lady Liberty before she hurts someone.”

Palmer’s plan was so simple it was kind of brilliant. Mendoza had come into the dungeon cell with two guards. He had been going to bring one of us out—one prisoner—for interrogation. And in fact, he walked out with two guards and a prisoner, exactly as he was supposed to. Except the guards were Palmer and I, and the prisoner was Jim. And if Mendoza made one wrong move, we’d shoot him. So it was a little different.

Before we left the cell, Palmer told Mendoza exactly what to do and say, speaking in rapid Spanish. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could guess the gist of it. He wanted Mendoza basically to play the part of himself, as if everything were going according to plan. Mendoza listened silently to Palmer’s instructions and gave a single, stiff nod. He was going to obey for fear of getting shot—but you only had to look in his eyes to know that he would be waiting and watching, every second, for a chance to break free.

Well, I thought, let him try .

When he was done talking, Palmer nodded toward the cell door. Mendoza took a breath—to get control over his anger, I thought. Then he pounded on the door with his fist and shouted, “Abran!” Which I guessed meant open up.