Robert Jones - Blood Tide

“I’m afraid of you,” he whimpered, his voice slurred and staccato. It sounded like “Effredio.” Billy was just exulting in the fact that at last Kasim was talking English and had leaned in to give him a clout when Kasim suddenly stepped forward and kicked Billy square in the balls. As Billy buckled, Kasim pushed him over and kicked him again, in the ribs. “Are you afraida me! ” he screamed. He got in a few more good boots before the guards pulled him off and clubbed him down.

“Don’t kill him!” Billy yelled. One of the Tausuqs had drawn his bolo. The big Cebuano had a spear poised. “Later,” Billy told them. His voice was choked with pain. “Later, and slowly, slowly.”

Fuck the commo! Billy would get this guy to talk and then, when he was pinned and bleeding on the cross, flay him inch by inch. The crowd would love it.

Billy’s balls were still throbbing when the Cristos arrived. The screams and chants of the mob had reached a level of lunacy. Women were fainting, men ripping at their own faces until blood flowed, children dancing and pummeling one another dizzy, dogs howling and darting underfoot . . . a madhouse on a hilltop, under the noonday sun. The moriones —the mock centurions with their round, roached steel helmets and cuirasses and greaves and those horrible fright masks—came in for the worst of the crowd’s frenzy. Rotten fruit and dog turds bounced or splatted off their armor. Rocks clanked against their shields. Two of them broke from the circle guarding the Cristos and flailed the crowd with the flats of their swords, jabbed at its fringes with stiff, quick spearpoints that meant business. Men and women reeled away bleeding. A reek of pierced guts stung the air. The crowd retreated but redoubled its outcry.

Torres saw the town doctor, drunk on rum and staggering, watch bleary-eyed as the first Cristo took the nails—this one was a volunteer. The others waited stoically, their shoulders and backs rivered with blood from the flogging. The hammer clanged. The crowd howled along with it. Kasim stood straight, chin up, among the waiting Cristos. He had had the worst of it, despite his short walk under the scourges. Ridges of torn flesh striped his upper body, his mouth drooled blood over his unshaven chin. But his eyes were clear. Clear and hard. Torres made his way through the crowd to Kasim’s front. Kasim watched him approach.

“What do you have to tell me?” Billy asked.

Kasim spat full in his face. Blood mainly, but plenty of saliva. Kasim was not frightened. No man could spit that much if he were scared.

“Him next!” Torres ordered the moriones . “The dullest, rustiest nails you’ve got.”

But he felt respect for this man now, felt it for the first time. The respect muted his rage. He wiped the spittle from his face and watched, fascinated. Two moriones threw Kasim down onto his heavy, blood-stained cross. Another spread his arms and held his hands down on the wood. A fourth approached with the heavy iron maul and a handful of spikes. Kasim stared up at him, grinning.

“ Cobarde ,” he said happily to the morion with the hammer. “Moro cabrón. Maricónes , all of you. Sin cojónes! Come kill me, you big, fat, brave fairies.”

The crowd roared louder than ever as the first of the crosses went up. The volunteer Cristo sagged against the nails and fainted. Someone in the crowd threw a bucket of water on him. He awoke briefly, then fainted again.

“ Jesús, Jesús, Jesús, Jesús . . .” The crowd began to chant in unison now. “ El Salvador! El Salvador! Hijo de Dios! Jesús! Jesús Rey! ”

The morion with the hammer placed the first spike point on Kasim’s right palm. Kasim spit in his face. As the morion leaned back to wipe his face, another morion suddenly stabbed Kasim with his spear. It was the Cebuano. The spearpoint took Kasim in the chest—deep, to the bar of the crossguard—and the morion twisted it once, twice, thrice . . .

Kasim heaved his back clear of the cross, against the spear’s thrust. His eyes went wide—focused on someone in the crowd. “ Traidor! ” he screamed.

Billy spun to follow Kasim’s eyes. He looked amidst the crowd—red, wild-eyed faces; black, gaping mouths; yellow teeth, as yellow as a horse’s, snaggled and flashing over glistening wet tongues; tears and sweat running thick and fast down a screaming wall of faces. . . . And a priest standing there, watching Kasim. An old priest, white-haired, white-bearded, his mouth a grim line, his eyes hard and brown. Soldier’s eyes. A priest in a long black cassock. A priest making a cross in the air. A priest not sweating at all. Then a woman at the priest’s side grabbed his arm and with it pointed to Torres. It was Rosalinda.

The crowd surged forward, knocking Billy sideways before he could move. The mob swarmed over the centurions, over the other Cristos, over Kasim, where he lay on his cross.

By the time the centurions had beaten the crowd back, Kasim was dead. So was the Cebuano. Someone had ripped his Longinus mask so that it lay crooked on his face. A knife had entered the eyehole and remained buried, to the hilt, in the spearman’s face. A dozen bodies littered the hilltop, some still writhing.

The priest was gone. So was Rosalinda.

Curt was adrift on the South China Sea. Both Thunders were adrift, about a mile apart. There was water in the reserve gas drums. Now and then the two big engines would light off and run for a minute or two, but then—inevitably—they crapped out again. The batteries were growing weaker and weaker with each abortive start. And the sea was a mirror—practically windless, unbearably hot. What little wind there was came in cat’s-paws from the northeast, pushing them back toward Cambodia when it reached them, eating up what little gains they had made. He didn’t know whether to curse the breeze or bless it. When it blew, at least it provided momentary relief from the heat. The air was like wet, hot cotton wool, and the sun pounded down through it with a beat that stung his skin as sharply as any Portuguese man-o’-war would have.

They’d made the pickup all right this time, no sweat—a floatplane load of opium bricks, well off the Thai coast. The sea’s calmness had been welcome then. Curt expected the roar of Phantoms every minute during the exchange. Of course, the Thunder engines had run beautifully during the trip across. It wasn’t until they were halfway back that the trouble began.

Finally, though, after three straight hours of battery depletion, rising and crashing hopes, more curses in English, Spanish, and Tausuq than the South China Sea had heard in eons of seagoing horrors, Abdul had found a chamois cloth down in the forepeak. They emptied one drum of the polluted gasoline and were now slowly, painfully straining water-mixed gas from another drum into the only container they had—a leaky Igloo cooler. So far they had collected barely two gallons, half of which Abdul wanted to give to the other Thunder.

“Fuck them, Abdul,” Curt told him. “Let them figure it out for themselves.”

“No,” Abdul said.

Curt’s head was reeling with the fumes he’d inhaled. His skin was on fire. He was about as strong as a soggy Kleenex. If only they could get under way, he’d be fine. Just fine.

“I order you, Abdul. I’m the captain here. Let’s get going. Home.”

“No,” Abdul said.

“Goddamn it, Abdul. Do it! ”

“Fuck you, you infidel dog turd.”

Curt went for a wrench.

Abdul had it. He also had his bolo drawn. He started the Thunder’s engine and drove west, back to the other boat. They shared the gasoline. It lasted barely half an hour. Then they began to strain gasoline again.