Portia
We just stand there and watch the women and girls lifted off the truck. I count a dozen. All in various states of dress, some with bound wrists. All looking terrified as they’re led single file down to the waiting boat which has just started its engine.
One tries to run, and a soldier punches her. Just punches her right in the temple. The force off it knocks her sideways. Someone else screams as she staggers, stumbles, tries again to run. The soldier doesn’t punch her this time. He takes his gun out, cocks it, and shoots her in the stomach.
I don’t scream but the others do. In my periphery, I see my uncle take a drag off his cigarette while Fernando watches the scene with cold indifference.
The woman drops to the ground and the others behind her are made to step over her body. She’s still alive, curled around herself, clutching her stomach. Blood expands in a circle around her, as the man who pulled the trigger, nudges her with his foot and then laughs.
She’ll bleed to death. And it will be excruciatingly painful.
Fear clogs around my throat as every will to fight them slowly does away.
Where are you, Callahan?
I hear my name my name just then.
I turn to find my uncle and Fernando walking toward me. My uncle is talking, still casually smoking. I remember he used to smoke but had told my brothers he’d given it up.
Fernando puts his sunglasses on as the sunlight breaks the horizon. He looks so different from last time. Fresher, a bit fatter. I stiffen when they approach, and I’m dragged forward to meet them.
“She’s a little bit of a handful. You may remember,” my uncle starts, but I’m too shocked to speak, too terrified to fight. Will I be loaded onto that boat too? Then what? What will happen?
Will Callahan ever find me? Will he bother to look for me? Will he know or even care what happened to me?
Behind them, the car door opening snags my attention. It’s the other man from the backseat. But he’s got his back to me so I can’t see his face.
“You did good,” Fernando tells my uncle, gaze lecherous, the licking of his lips turning my stomach.
Even as my shock at seeing him registers, there’s more in store. It happens so fast. These things always happen so shockingly fast.
Fernando moves his arm behind him and then there’s a click. Just a soft little click. I know my uncle hears it too because his grin falters as he begins to turn in the direction of Fernando. I wonder if he registers what is about to happen, as Fernando raises the gun, leveling it with my uncle’s forehead.
There isn’t any hesitation on Fernando’s side. Nothing but that cool smile on his lips.
It all happens in the span of moments. Split seconds. The man from the car turns, the sun’s shifting position not allowing me to see his face. He’s just a shape at the far end of the lot.
My uncle’s grinning expression morphs into one of terror.
Fernando pulls the trigger and for the third time in almost as many days, blood splatters across my face and into my mouth. My uncle’s body falls sideways to the ground.
Dead. Just like that. Dead, while the woman who was shot moments ago still moans in agony as her life slowly bleeds out of her.
Dead. Final. The end.
I look at Fernando, his eyes on my chest travel lower as he tucks the gun into the back of his khakis. An erection presses against the front of his pants. He’s aroused. It’s not from looking at me. It’s from the kill.
Violence always aroused him.
The other man from the car says something. He’s speaking English, but with an accent. I still can’t make out his face. The sun is blinding, but when Fernando steps toward me, my attention is fully on him as I try to free myself of the vise-like grips of the soldiers.
Fernando takes a syringe out of the breast pocket of his shirt and pushes the plunger, clearing any air.
“Long time no see,” he says in that voice that always turned my blood to ice. Without warning, he grips a handful of my hair and forces my head to the side to push the needle into my neck.
I feel the effects almost instantly as my knees give out, touching gravel, the soldiers’ hands still painful on my arms.
“Cover her for fuck’s sake,” the man with the accented English says and I feel something over my shoulders. I can almost place the aftershave, but my vision has faded.
Voices, too, just sounds I can’t make out. I’m dragged to where I hear the water lapping against the boats, hear the sounds of frightened women.
Their warm bodies the last thing I feel against my own before I lose consciousness.