Where Fires Are to Burn, page 17
Kiara waited.
“Where the hell is that stupid dog?” she muttered to herself.
She watched where the men had cast the items into the water, and the thought flooded her mind that should the dog have caught the cart early, it may well be laying there in the water too.
She knew she had to find out or risk searching the village for something that may already be lost.
She crawled forward through the scrubby land, her fingers in the sand and her face scratched with thorns, until she was sure her path to the waterline was safe
She rose to her feet and ran stooped to the water’s edge.
As she neared the timber buildings where the fenceline met the river, there came into view before her a great pile of things which had been cast into the water, a dumping ground of items pillaged from the camps which the men did not want. The pile was high, damming half the river so that the white water pushed up the opposite riverbank and wore away the soil, carving a sweeping bend in the ground.
In the river to her side, she saw the little shoes sticking out from the water, still attached to the little legs and filthy brown kneesocks.
She stopped.
Looking closer into the darkness, the grotesque image presented itself to her. The river was piled, ten feet high and twice that wide, with bodies of men and women and children, tangled and pale and bloodied and broken. Their clothes were torn, some removed completely so that their wet and ghostly bodies shimmered in the moonlight and reflected the glow of the moon. Their eyes white, their hair thinning, gunshot and stabbed and battered and wounded and rotting.
Kiara fell backwards into the sand, her own eyes wide at the gruesome vision.
She understood why the water at the bridge was poisoned. It was poisoned with the rot and the blood and the souls of those who dared to drink from it. Those simple people who passed on the road in need of rest. The operation had been precise, a well-practiced drill. They had dismantled the campsite in less than a minute, carrying away everything that was there, kicking sand over the fires and taking to the river its occupants.
There were shouts from inside the compound.
Calls of a woman or a girl, perhaps two. The shrill sound carried across the night, over the stone buildings from inside the village where Kiara couldn’t see. There was a fire burning in the place, flicking orange light against the surrounding homes and casting long dark shadows of men over the dry land.
Kiara waited and listened.
The shouts continued, pleading for help, warbling and terrified. Men around her laughed loudly.
Kiara crept a little closer to the fenceline to try to see inside, past the stone homes into the village square, but it was obscured from view.
The crying woman was most likely taken from the camp alive, and Kiara feared the very worst for what she may have to endure. But she knew that there was nothing that she could do. She could not save the woman from her fate, whatever that was. She could not charge the compound, a single pistol and old blade, limping from a fresh wound. The men were all armed, each one of them. She knew she would barely make it over the fenceline before her fate joined that of the crying woman inside.
Her eyes glazed with tears, her heart throbbed with the helplessness, but that land was filled with horrific evil and she must survive, more importantly than anything. She must survive for her son. There could be no value put on a human life, but for what value there was, Dylan meant more to her than the woman who cried for help from inside that place, and it was a battle she could not enter, let alone triumph.
She cursed the lord she once gave her life to.
If there was a final judgement, a day of the lord, then surely it had been already and all those who still walked that dry earth were forgotten or not worthy and had been left there to fend for themselves without a divine hand.
“Lord of mercy, if you have anything to give, comfort us in our time of suffering, so that we might comfort those who need it now the most”
She looked up to the eternal blackness and knew she had been left.
There was nothing that would be offered to her, no solace from the torment, no agreement of reprieve.
She kept low, and moved back away into the dusty scrubland to the riverbank and headed back east to the road, resigning the poor woman to her destiny along with the dog.
She walked slowly, tears in her eyes. The white moonlight flicked against the thorns on the barrel cacti and within a moment there was nothing more to be heard but the flow of the Atoyac.
In the darkness at the water’s edge she saw movement, the flick of a tail and the glinting of two white eyes in the night.
She stopped.
There were grey wolves and pumas wild there, and both roamed alone at night.
No sooner had she frozen herself to the spot and raised the pistol than the animal ran at her, bounding noisily up the dusty bank and across the scrubland and throwing itself at her legs, wet with riverwater.
“You’re a stupid dog” she shouted at it, relieved to see the thing alive and with her and free from the danger that surrounded them, but likewise angry at the thing for putting both of them in the situation that it did, and angry at herself for straying too close to the raiders’ compound when the dog was likely at the river there the entire time.
She clipped the top of its head with her hand.
“I should have just left you. What’s wrong with you, dammit? Next time that’s it, I’m not coming after you”
It panted loudly and tried to lick her hand and she walked off into the darkness and the dog trotted behind her, oblivious as ever.
Chapter Thirteen
For eleven days Kiara walked south, unrelenting. The slow and steady and unstoppable walk of a migrating elephant, eyes fixed to the road as the sun arced above her time and again, lighting the horizon and then burning the day before falling away again to come around once more.
She walked the day and sheltered or did not shelter at all in the night, her feet numb in her leather boots. The dog grew skinny but it walked on with her. It took to eating the grasses and frequently brought them back up and she worried for its health.
Every few hours, another insignificant village or town would silently build up around them and then drip away as they passed. The places were nameless, faceless, nothing but something to look at on their trip. They were each battered by poverty and she frequently saw things she wished she had not. The dead were not buried, not hidden. They lay where they fell, no person there with the energy or tool or inclination to bury them or burn them or otherwise. What was left of the people’s faiths had diminished. Crosses were worn, prayers uttered for the suffering, but the people knew they had missed the ascendance. They had missed what coming there had been, left in the dirt whilst their saviour walked on without them. They prayed regardless but the words were empty, as they feared they had always been.
As the road picked through the dry foothills of the sierra, bending from side to side like water searching for a route through drystone, the breeze brought with it the sweet smell of firesmoke from the south. It fluttered through the valley floor, and Kiara kept her eyes to the hills for sign of the camp, and though nothing showed itself the smell continued. The further along the road she walked, the more the smell blew across her, and as she were imagining what barn or home may be burning, the words of the officer from the military base spun through her head.
“The south of Mexico burns”
She pressed on regardless. She did not care what burned, it would not burn enough to prevent her finding her son.
At the northern edge of Oaxaca city, the sky grew dark, the wispy smoke trails blew across the horizon like climbing tornados from the desert floor, trunks of black smoke from individual fires that drifted away into the greater cloud of fumes above.
The neighbourhoods of Los Jimenez and Poblado Morelos were no more, levelled to blackness. Homes that stood there had burned long ago, and the flame and smoke long dispersed. There remained a charred carpet of impassable detritus, ash blowing across the place like awful snow.
Nothing there moved. The road had been cleared of what wreckage had once fallen on it, though her boots pushed through the black and white snowfall which fell around her ceaselessly.
Beyond, to the south, Oaxaca still stood, partly. It was there that the military had been relocated from far around to battle the blazes in the absence of any fire department.
Water had been drained from the Atoyac that flowed south with the road through the city, and carried by hand and by horse and by cart to where it was needed. Tanker lorries that had once carried water and milk and oil were recommissioned by the military and used for firefighting, each pulled by thirty horses or more. It had not been an entirely unsuccessful effort, though it had been long and men had been lost to the cause.
What remained was a city pock-marked with charred buildings where fire had been fought off, sporadic breakouts of flame from hidden places where ashes still smouldered and threatened to lick-up anything they could take hold of. The smoke swirled the paper-like ashes overhead.
The roadway was wide enough to have kept intact, passing straight through the blackened wreckage into the heart of the city. No tree lined its shoulder, the roadsigns that stood at the verge or hung overhead were scorched and bent, their place names obscured by the black as though a ghastly indication as to what lay ahead on that road.
Kiara and the dog walked south, the burned homes climbing the hills to the east and west, overlooking each other and nothing at all, until the sun dipped behind them and they were forced to stop once more.
As the road passed through Santa Rosa, the crumbled shell of a superstore was raised from the roadway, set back atop a concrete ramp that elevated it from the tarmac, the car park encircling its base. The raised elevation had prevented the front façade from succumbing entirely to the flame and the chips of red paint were still visible against the black. Kiara climbed the dog through the rubble, stepping over the charred remains of every thing that had once made up that town, fabrics turned to dust, glass and ceramics shattered into sand and metal bent and blackened and sharp enough at the point to cut through her boots.
She forced the dog to walk carefully, and it appeared to understand the peril, stepping slowly amongst the jagged ashes.
At the front of the store, which had largely fallen in on itself, they clambered over the front wall and took to shelter from the wind and the night. She pulled her coat around herself and wrapped up in the blanket, pulling the dog close to share one another’s warmth, and simply waited there for the sun to rise.
They heard scavengers in the night, men with horses and ploughs, pulling methodically through the ashen sea, looking for what remained, though there was very little at all. Men covered in soot from top to toe like things of the underworld, eyes reddened, long blackened fingers poking around for gems in the dirt, their hacking coughs echoing around the land before them like the barks of dying dogs.
The night was still but for the gentle breeze coming off the hills, blowing the ash around in little cyclones, though the place was permeated with the smell of burned plastic and rubber and rot.
At first light they quickly climbed back down to the road to continue their progress into Oaxaca.
At Villa del Marquez, the road was clear to the west. Kiara stood and watched. The junction had been intentionally and purposefully cleared so as to allow passage to the Atoyac. The road there had once crossed a simple stone roadbridge painted with red, joining the main body of the city to the neighbourhoods of the west. The river had provided a natural fire barrier when the place was ablaze, and the districts of Azteca and Santa Cruz and Jacarandas had been allowed to burn away, a vast black desert passing away to the horizon where the dusky purple hills watched over it, untouched as they had always been.
The city to the east, where the government’s assets lay, was beginning to look to Kiara more like the city it had once been. Entire roads of buildings stood. Greyed by smoke and with bolted windows and dead gardens, but standing nonetheless.
Kiara picked through the little sideroads past the stone homes to the river’s edge. She cleaned herself in the water and the dog drank feverishly. Memories of what lay in that water to the north flooded back to her, and she considered not washing there, out of respect and trepidation as to the state of the water. But she was in no position to choose what water she washed with, or drank, or fed to her dog. Not in that dry land.
She took her coat and laid it at the water’s edge and took off her boots and stood in the shallows and splashed the water through her hair, pulling pieces of tissue-like ash from it which dissolved in her fingers to the touch. She pulled it straight and wrung the water from the tips and let it fall against her back.
Three young boys watched her from the opposite bank. She smiled across to them and waved a hand, and they laughed and ran around in circles and disappeared into the black desert.
Gunfire rang out across the rooftops behind her and she took up her coat and hat and picked the boots from the ground, and walked the dog back to the road to redress herself.
She stood against the stone wall, facing the river, and pulling the red coat up around her shoulders.
More shots, from an automatic rifle, and shouting through the streets, the sound winding around the buildings and deceiving in its direction. Kiara pulled the pistol from her belt.
She crossed the dried scrubland to the road and at the end she passed along a spraypainted alleyway that slid behind a row of homes, keeping her head down as she walked. Gunfire rattled and her ears rung and the dog flinched and they quickened their pace. The alleyway took her to the main road, a row of old stores, their signs in red and black reading Taceria and Consultorios Medicos and Auto Escuela. They were smashed and looted and some burned but mostly the buildings there stood free of damage, salvaged at the time of the infernos and permitted to live on as remnants of what life there had once been there.
Though there was life no more.
No person walked idly along those streets, travelling or trading or passing by. The place was a warzone. Along the roadway, three men scrambled over a high wall and fell on to the concrete, staggering to get up, clutching rifles and rucksacks, the front man dragging the next by the scruff of his shirt to pull him faster from danger. The first two disappeared along the road and darted between the buildings, though the third hit the ground harder and took a moment to gather himself.
It was to be the final moment he had.
A group of armed military spun around the corner and two more appeared on the wall behind him and at the first instance he was gunned down in a spray of blood. He dropped to the dust and was left where he fell, the green-clad soldiers taking off along the road after his accomplices.
Kiara kept against the stone buildings, sitting on her heels and holding the dog around the neck. She could not trust it to keep itself from trouble, and she feared that the creature may get both of them killed before sundown. It had walked without a leash thus far, but it was not to be allowed such freedom in the confines of a city, especially one as obviously ravaged with ganglife as that one.
She found the highway again and followed it another half mile south towards the centre of the city, the imposing satellites and communication towers of the Observatorio Astronómico lining the hillside above her.
At the sweeping white steel arches of the auditorium, the highway gave way to the south and the panoramic vista of the city of Oaxaca spread out before her. She stood at the metal barricade at the edge of the road and looked out across the place. The twisters of fire smoke whipped around in the distance and huge swathes of the city had been swallowed by it already, blackened and levelled and turned back to the dust from which they came. Gunshots crackled in the distance in a place indeterminable, carried on the breeze with the ever-pervasive stink of burned metal and rubber.
The place was as uninviting as she could have imagined, but she would walk in the burning of any flame to find her son, she would kick what ash and cough what smoke was needed until she complete her quest. She would walk where fires still burned, until they burned the very boots from her feet, and she would walk where fire are to burn yet.
She resolved to search that place until she found the military, and she reckoned she may not have to look far, for the place was under-siege.
She climbed over the yellow barrier and scrambled down the dusty bank through the grama grass and the twisted skeletons of thorn, pulling long threads from her red coat as she went. The dog stepped nervously behind her, edging sideways through the grass, trying to pick out a clearer route which was not there.
At the bottom, she dropped to the ground behind a parking garage and gathered herself and straightened out her coat and repositioned the hat on her wet hair and listened for a moment.
She walked along the quiet street without any idea of a route, walking downhill without thinking about it. The buildings there were painted in deep yellows and dusky reds and pinks and graffitied from top to bottom, faceless names and logos and cryptic clues and signals and calling cards between the cartels of that place, messages passed silently between those who operated the underworld. The windows were boarded and barred and cars in the street were torched and dogs lay dead in the sun, their hair fading and their skin pulling tight around their bloated and baked bodies. Oaxaca’s once significant feral dog problem had finally been remedied, to the sorry detriment of the dogs.
Shots rang out again and the dog flinched and Kiara stooped behind a wrecked truck and took the dog by the neck.
At the end of the road, a group of military personnel passed, rifles readied. They moved quietly and quickly, the lance corporal at the front wearing a black baseball cap and giving signals to his fireteam with his hands alone.
