If We Survive

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I never saw a human being move so fast. It was some sort of serious kung fu movie action, over so quickly my eye couldn’t even record it in detail. I remember moments of it—like snapshots kind of, frozen in my brain. Palmer’s open hand jabbing up like a knife. The same hand slicing like a sword. The one guard reeling backward, his mouth open, his tongue out, his eyes wide. The other guard folding at the knees and collapsing to the floor like a dropped rag doll. And Palmer’s arms wheeling around—like he was doing some kind of magic act, you know, trying to distract your attention. But what he was doing was twisting the second guard’s rifle off his shoulder even before the guard had time to drop.

Before I could comprehend what had happened—before my mind could even register what I’d just seen—the two guards lay lifeless on the floor and Palmer stood alone with a machine gun in his hand, the barrel leveled straight at Mendoza.

And there was one final snapshot captured by my brain— my favorite snapshot.

Mendoza, remember, had turned his back on Palmer. He was walking to the door. When the fight started behind him, he heard the noise and wheeled around—but it was all over so fast that by the time he was facing Palmer again, Palmer had the gun on him. So I caught this final image of the look on Mendoza’s face, pure shock, the arrogance draining out of his eyes, the color draining out of his cheeks. His hand had gone automatically to the pistol on his belt… but it was already too late.

“Go on,” Palmer said quietly—smiling, grinning just like before. “Go on. Pull it, Mendoza. I want you to.”

But Mendoza took one look at Palmer—Palmer standing between the corpses of the two gunmen on the floor—and he knew the American would empty the machine gun into him before the pistol got halfway out of that holster. His hand moved away from it. Both his hands lifted from his sides.

I hate to remember what went through me then. Seeing Mendoza standing there at gunpoint, I felt a lightning flash of rage and hatred in me so terrible it seemed almost to take me over. I felt I had no control over myself—that the power of my rage was forcing me into motion. Because there was Mendoza—Mendoza who had threatened me when I was helpless—who had threatened Nicki and Meredith just seconds ago—threatened us all with terrible tortures. And now he was the helpless one, all his power gone. And my rage and hatred for him had taken me over and were telling me to launch myself at him, to wrap my fingers around his ugly throat and…

“Easy, kid,” said Palmer. “We’re the good guys. Remember?”

I don’t know how he knew what was going on inside me. I hadn’t moved from the spot. I hadn’t said a word. But he did know somehow. And the moment he spoke, I did remember. I remembered who I was, what I was. And it turned out the electric rage and hatred could not control me after all.

The emotion drained out of me almost at once. My hands, which had curled into claws ready for the attack, relaxed. My arms fell to my sides.

It was a moment that would come back to me later. It was a moment that would come back to me a lot and for a long time.

“Put it on the floor, Mendoza,” Palmer said now. He meant the pistol. “Slowly. Thumb and finger.”

Mendoza had regained a bit of his composure. He was relaxed again—or, that is, he was pretending to be relaxed in spite of the fury in his eyes. His hand went back to his belt. Slowly, he followed Palmer’s instructions.

“You are surrounded by guards and barbed wire,” he said as, using only his thumb and finger, he unbuckled his holster and drew out his gun. “You really think you can escape from here?”

“I think I can kill you in a split second if you don’t do what I tell you,” Palmer said.

Mendoza tried to snort at that, but his eyes were full of helplessness and anger. I knew how he felt. He dropped the pistol to the floor in front of him.

“Kick it over to the kid,” Palmer said, nodding at me.

Sneering with disdain, Mendoza kicked the pistol to me. I started to bend down to reach for it.

But Palmer said, “Not yet, kid. The fatigues. Put them on.”

For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I realized: he wanted me to undress the dead guard and put on his uniform.

“You want me to dress up as a guard?” I asked. “But my face… my hair…”

“It’s fine,” Palmer said quickly. “It’s not like in the hills. Plenty of Santa Marians are as pale-skinned as you are— especially now after the sun has been baking you for a week. Just cover as much of your hair as you can with the bandanna. Now do it. Fast.”

I knelt down next to the body. I thought back to how I’d had to strip the rifle off the gunman from the firing squad. I hadn’t wanted to touch a dead man then, and I didn’t want to do it now. But I guess I’d gotten a little practice in suspending the imagination since then. This time I just decided not to think about it, and I didn’t. I took the corpse’s clothes off as quickly as I could. I stripped out of mine. And a minute or two later I was wearing the khaki uniform of the revolution. Not a bad fit either. I tied the red bandanna around my forehead and pulled it up to hide my hair.

“Now pick up the pistol,” Palmer said. “Click off the safety.”

I didn’t know much about guns, and it took me a second to find the little switch he was talking about. But I found it.

“Now point the gun at Mendoza and if he moves, pull that little trigger gizmo on the bottom,” Palmer said.

I pointed the pistol at Mendoza, my finger on the trigger. Palmer leaned his rifle against the wall. He stooped down and started pulling the fatigues off the other dead guard.

Mendoza turned from him to me. He looked down at the pistol I had aimed at him. He smiled a condescending smile.

“You really think you have the courage to do it?” he asked.

I heard myself laugh—it was a crazy sound. But if he only knew how close I’d come to killing him with my bare hands, he wouldn’t have asked the question.

I guess he got his answer in my laughter, because his condescending smile disappeared. He turned away from me. He turned to Jim instead.

Jim was standing against the opposite wall. He looked as if he couldn’t comprehend what was happening. His lanky body had gone completely stiff. His face had gone completely blank. His bug-eyes were staring straight ahead—staring at nothing, as far as I could tell, just staring into space.

“And you,” Mendoza said to him. “You who know better than these others.”

Jim blinked. He shifted his stare from nothing to the rebel. “What?” he said in a distant voice.

“You are not a fool like they are. Not just some spoiled American. You understand the difficulties facing my country, my people.”

“Yes…,” said Jim, still as if he were very far away.

“Do you still wish to speak to the new president?” Mendoza asked him.

“I…,” said Jim.

“Because this can be arranged, you know. It is not too late. Fernandez Cobar is a great man, a great spirit, but he is always ready to listen to even the humblest petitioner.”

I heard Palmer chuckle at that as he stripped down, getting ready to change into the guard’s fatigues. “What a guy!” he muttered.

I went on pointing the pistol at Mendoza, barely listening to what he said, just watching for any sudden movements— half hoping, if you want the truth, that he would give me an excuse to pull the trigger.

Jim just went on staring at him. His mouth opened and closed. And then he said, “Who are you? Who are you people?”

Mendoza straightened a little as if with pride. “We are soldiers of justice,” he said. “You say you are familiar with President Cobar’s work. You should know this. We are soldiers of justice.”

Jim slowly shook his head, like a man coming out of a dream. “You were going to torture us. You were going to torture the girls. You said you were acting on direct orders of the president.”

Mendoza answered with a little shrug. “Do you think justice is easy? Do you think you can make things fair without using force? People are not equal by nature—you must compel them to be equal. President Cobar understands that if you want to build a better world, you must destroy all of those who stand in your way.”

“But… But… But…,” said Jim, slowly coming back to himself. “That’s not a better world. That’s this world. That’s the world we have already.”

Palmer chuckled again. “You can probably get some cash for those old Cobar books on e-Bay, Professor,” he said with a grin. “You can throw in your Che Guevara T-shirts while you’re at it.”

He was just buttoning up the khaki shirt. It was too small for him—it looked like it would rip open if he moved too fast—but I guessed if nobody looked too closely, he would pass for a rebel, same as me.

When he’d finished tying the red bandanna around his forehead, he put his hand out to me. I gave him the pistol. He held it on Mendoza while, with his free hand, he took the machine gun off the wall and tossed it my way. I caught it. Then, while I trained the rifle on Mendoza, Palmer shucked the magazine out of the pistol and popped out the shell in the chamber. He handed the empty gun back to Mendoza.

“Holster it,” he said.

Mendoza hesitated, glancing at me, at my gun. He didn’t like taking orders. But he didn’t have much choice. He slid the empty pistol back into its holster.

Palmer took a deep breath. He looked at Jim. He looked at me.

“All right, boys,” he drawled in that ironic way of his. “I think we better go rescue Lady Liberty before she hurts someone.”