Stephen (ed.) - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 18

“Ah,” says Pobrecito, and reflexively offers them the wine. Perhaps it will save him from whatever is next. He doubts that, though.

The leader, for he has more decoration on his buttoned shoulder tabs, strokes the bright leather of his pistol belt for a moment, then smiles. It is a horrid sort of smile, something a man remembering an old photo he is trying to imitate might offer up. The other two do not bother. Instead they merely cradle a machete each, staring corpse-eyed at Pobrecito. All three of them are fat, their bellies bigger than their hips, unlike anyone in the colonia , except a few who are dying of growths in their guts.

No one takes the wine.

“You are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz, is it not true?” the leader asks.

This is not what Pobrecito expected. “Ah . . . no. She comes here sometimes.”

The leader consults a thin notebook, ragged with handling, pages nearly black with ink. “You are Pobrecito the street merchant, no address, of the colonia .”

“Yes.”

“Then you are the guardian of Lucia Sandoz. It says so here in my book, and so this must be a true thing.” His smile asserts itself again. “We have a summons for her.” All three guardia peer around, as if expecting her to fall from the sky. Pobrecito realizes this has become an old game for them already.

“She is not mine,” he says to his feet. Not Lucia. “And besides,” he adds, “she is a menoriita . She cannot be used in the manner of a woman.” Will this help?

They laugh, his tormentors, before one of the machete-carriers says, “How would you know if you hadn’t had her?”

The leader leans close. “She is clean , boy. That is enough these days.”

Then they beat him, using the flat of the machete blades and the rough toes of their boots. Pobrecito loses most of his left ear when a blade slips, and the palm of his hand is cut to the bone, but they stop before staving in his ribs or breaking any large bones.

“Find her,” says the leader. Pobrecito can barely hear him through the pain and blood in his ear. The guardia tears the pages of the books from their bindings, unzips, and urinates on the paper. Taking the wine bottle, he turns to leave. “Before tomorrow.”

Pobrecito does not waste time on crying. He stumbles to his tree, knowing there are some extra clothes there that he can use to bind his ear and his hand. There are so many sicknesses that come in through bloody cuts and sores – black rot, green rot, the red crust – and he fears them all.

Stumbling, eyes dark and head ringing, Pobrecito can barely climb his tree because his arms and legs hurt so much. When he reaches the branch, he sees that someone has been at his cache of riches and food. Guardia , dogs, it does not matter. The hollow in the trunk has been hacked open, made wide and ragged with an axe or a machete, and everything that is not gone is smashed or torn or broken. His riches are nothing but trash now.

“I will never be an American,” Pobrecito whispers. He lays his mutilated ear against the slashed palm of his hand, pressing them together to slow the bleeding and protect the wounds from insects. Despite the pain, he lays that side of his head against the branch and stretches out to surrender to the ringing darkness.

“Wake up, fool!” It is Lucia’s voice. She is slapping him.

Pobrecito feels strange. His skin is itchy, crawly, prickly.

More slaps.

“Stop it this instant!” Her voice is rising toward a frightening break.

He opens his mouth to answer her and flies tumble in.

He is covered in flies.

“Gaaah!” Pobrecito screams.

“Get them off before they bite,” she says, her voice more under control.

Pobrecito stumbles to his feet, runs down the branch where it overhangs the water.

“Not the river . . .” she says behind him, but it is too late. The old branch narrows, is rotten, his legs are weak, his eyes not clear. In a crackling shower of wood, flies and blood, Pobrecito tumbles the five or six meters downward to slam into the slow, brown water, knocking the air from his body.

The river is blood warm, shocking him awake. He is under the surface, eyes open to a uniform brown with no way up. The water is sticky, strange, clinging to him, trying to draw him further down. Pobrecito kicks his legs, trying to come out, but there is still no up.

At least the flies are gone.

He begins to wonder if he could open his mouth and find something besides the burning in his empty lungs.

Something scrapes his legs. Something long, slow and powerful. Pobrecito throws his hands out and finds a stick. He pulls on it, but it does not come, so he pulls himself toward it.

A moment later he is gasping and muddy, clinging to a root sticking out from the river bank. Air is in his lungs, blessed air. Behind him the water burbles as the long, slow, powerful thing circles back to test him again. Out in the middle of the river, the dogs are barking.

Lucia is scrambling down the tree trunk, sobbing. “Fool! Idiot!”

She helps him pull himself out before his legs are taken. He lies on the bank gasping and crying, blessedly free of flies. He does not want to think about what the river water might have done to his wounds. “They . . . they came . . . they came for you . . .” he spits out.

“No one wants me,” she says fiercely.

“They said you were clean . That clean was enough for them these days.”

She is quiet for a moment. “Fire-piss is killing the rich men up in the city, the old women say. The priests have heard from god that to fuck a clean woman takes the fire-piss from the man and gives it to her.”

“How do you know? No one comes back.”

“Some people pass in and out of the walls. Servants. Farmers. The word comes. And the cemetery is overflowing, up on the hill. With rich city men.” She stares at him for a moment. “The colonia girls they dump down the old wells with some quicklime and gravel, and a prayer if they’re feeling generous.”

“Ahhh . . .” He weeps, eyes filling with hot tears as they hadn’t for the beating, or for anything in his memory, really. “And they want you now.”

“The cure does not work, but it does not stop them from trying over and over. The priests say it is so, that they are not faithful enough. Up in the city, they believe they can make the world however they want it.” She stares at him for a while. “And perhaps they have a taste for new girls all the time.”

Pobrecito thinks about his American pictures. Obviously many people had a taste for new girls all the time. Has he somehow been feeding this evil? But he doesn’t sell his pictures in the city, or even to city men. Not directly. He has always wondered if some of his buyers did.

And if he could make the world the way he wanted it, he would wish away the heat and the insects and the sicknesses. He would make them all Americans like in his pictures, naked, happy, pale-skinned blondes with big houses and tables full of food and more water than any sane person could ever use. He would not wish for more girls to kill. Not even if God told him to.

“I want to show you something,” he says.

“Show me soon. I think the dogs are coming over.”

“In the day?”

“You got their attention, my friend.”

Out at the airplane, dogs were gathering on the wing, their feet in the slow water. Some of them were casting sticks and stones out into the river, looking for that great predator that had touched Pobrecito for a moment. Others growl through pointed teeth, eyes glowing at him. Smoke curls from some of the shattered oval windows. Great red and blue letters, faded and worn as the tail’s flag, loom along the rounded top of the airplane in some American prayer for the coming assault.