CHAPTER 5
Russell Johnson
“Carlos!”
Igancia leapt from the Jeep, half expecting to find Carlos staring down a Chupacabra, with blood dripping from its fangs. But all she found there was a dust cloud blowing across the scorched landscape.
“Carlos!” she called again. Still no answer. It was like he had vanished.
Up until that moment, Ignacia had never really believed the stories. Una bruja. She assumed all that talk was just a boogeyman, a Kaiser-Soze-spook-story invented to keep superstitious drug runners in line. But as she circled around the wrecked vehicles in desperate search for her companion, she was ready to suspend all disbelief.
Then she saw him. Carlos, standing on one leg, like a flamingo, balancing in place.
“What the hell?”
“Shhh,” he said. “I’m trying to concentrate.” Droplets of sweat rolled down his forehead.
Ignacia moved toward him.
“Stop!”
“What? Why?”
Carlos was breathing so rapidly, he could barely speak. “I stepped on something,” he managed. “Something metal. Mechanical. And it beeped. Like beep, bop, boop.”
Ignacia wasn’t getting it, so Carlos spelled it out for her. “A landmine. I’m. Standing. On a landmine.”
“What?” Ignacia didn’t believe him, yet at the same time felt cold sweat prickle up from the base of her neck to the middle of her back.
“Carlos, this isn’t the DMZ.”
“You don’t understand,” Carlos said. “My cousin, In Arizona. He was in the Marines. At Gitmo. He told me how they put landmines all around the base to keep the Cubans from crossing into American soil.”
“But that was the Cubans,” Ignacia argued. “They used them to keep their own people in. The Americans don’t—” Ignacia paused. She wanted to say the Americans don’t do things like that, but she couldn’t. Not anymore. If they would put kids in cages, who knew what else were capable of.
Carlos said, “Everyone thought that orange-haired bastard was crazy. Gonna build a wall and make Mexico pay for it. Costs too much money, right? What if this is what he was talking about? Just put down landmines. That’s his fucking wall. And he’ll make the Mexicans pay for it with their lives.”
“You’re not even Mexican.”
“Tell that to the landmine!”
Ignacia feared there could be no reasoning with Carlos. He was obviously terrified. She slowly inched toward the spot, ten yards away, where he was teetering in place.
“You’re talking crazy,” she said.
Carlos wobbled then steadied himself. “Crazy? You said it yourself. Something had to make Alejandro wreck—right where an MP was waiting. Like they were patrolling, right? What better place to patrol than where you buried the mines?”
Ignacia paused to consider that. Carlos continued, “And you brought it up yourself. El Nahual. Algunos duendes. The stories about drug mules disappearing at night, trying to cross the border. You tell me what’s more likely, that some mystical beast is attacking them, or they’ve been getting their asses blown up, because, just like us they wonder into the middle of a fucking minefield?”
Ignacia wished she was close enough to Carlos that she could slap him. Grab him by the shoulders and shake some sense into him. She tried again to stealthily approach him.
“Don’t come any closer,” he warned.
“Carlos, I promise, you are not standing on a landmine.”
“How do you know?”
Ignacia pointed to the military Jeep riddled with bullet holes.
“If the U.S. army was setting mines out here and killing all our drug mules, then why would they shoot up one of their own vehicles?”
Carlos appeared stumped by that question. He absent-mindedly lowered his right foot to within an inch of the ground before catching himself.
“Vigilantes!” he said. “Crazy American rednecks. Militia types. They hate their government almost as much as they hate immigrants. Maybe they’re the ones—”
“Listen to yourself,” Ignacia shouted. She pointed to the two smoking vehicles. “No civilians did that.”
Carlos looked at Ignacia like she’d made a good argument.
But Ignacia had passed the point of reasoning. She got down in a sprinter’s stance.
“What are you doing?” Carlos asked.
“I’m going to tackle you off of whatever it is your standing on.”
“No!”
Ignacia dug her boot into the dirt, to get traction. “If it’s really a landmine I’ll knock you clear,” she said.
“But what if—”
“Then we’ll blow up together. Just close your eyes, Carlos. I’ll count down from ten.”
“Ignacia, please don’t.”
“Ten, nine—”
Carlos did the points of the cross.
“Eight, seven—”
“Maybe we—”
“Six, five—”
“Oh, God, help me.”
“Four.”
Carlos closed his eyes. Ignacia didn’t wait any longer. She took off at a dead sprint, lunged horizontal to the ground, and speared Carlos like a javelin. The two rolled across the arid terrain as briskly as spindles of tumbleweed.
There was no explosion.
Ignacia propped herself up on an elbow, feeling bruised and battered. She was about to lash into Carlos with the ultimate of I-told-you-so’s but stopped when she saw it. The thing that Carlos had been standing upon.
Carlos sat up too. He followed Ignacia’s gaze to the shiny object, wedged into the soil.
It was Ignacia who spoke first, saying, “What in the hell is that?”
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