GPS (28 page)

To Jeff’s right, the revolucion flag — a solid orange banner with a large, raised brown fist in the middle and a white dove perched on its knuckles — covered the entire wall. Along the bottom were the words “Paz por la fuerza.”

Despite the words which were foreign to Jeff, it seemed the sudden surge of well-to-do white trash from the north, and perhaps the steady arrival of people like him, had mostly made English as important here as Spanish. Good thing for Jeff. The only Spanish he encountered was in writing thus far, or when one native spoke to another. But everyone seemed perfectly willing to treat him like an American in America so far.

Yet, there was Mexico on the wall to his left, and presumably right outside the office door, too. This sure as hell wasn’t good ol’ Zephyr Field or Home of the Owlz Stadium or Whataburger Field he was sitting beneath.

He looked to his left and studied the map for a long moment. Still not particularly listening to Paulo, who hadn’t stopped talking, Jeff assumed the orange pins concentrated in the middle of the country, which sporadically fanned out to the south, represented the revolucion on this map. There were also green and red pins dispersed at random through the same regions, but far fewer. Then, there was a sea of black pins that formed a nearly solid mass in the north-central region and fanned out in almost every direction, which had to be the Freemen. If it was an accurate depiction of the state of things, the map probably wasn’t the best recruiting tool to have hanging on the wall.

But despite its sobering layout of pins, the map seemed a necessary prop for Fonseca’s discourse because it seemed to give him immediate points of reference in the grand timeline. Jeff looked at it when Paulo looked at it, only Jeff wasn’t listening as much as he was just hearing. Fonseca not only spoke English, but did so impeccably well, with just a slight accent, another in the line of peculiarities about the man he noticed really did have a sailor’s spyglass tied to his belt like Jeff had dreamed about.

Paulo spoke in exhausting detail about the finer points of the war, a war Jeff was apparently expected to join. So far, he wasn’t hearing much that inspired him to do so. Intermittently, the man would squint at the map, stop talking and reach into his pocket for what at first looked to be a cell phone or an MP3 player, but was apparently a portable handheld GPS (
We know where you’re goin’).

Paulo paced the room all morning, detailing the history of the conflict, the meaning and the cause of it all, while the man sitting at the table was mostly splitting his thoughts between finding the nearest
full
bottle of whiskey and finding a way back out of here. Or both, if possible. Though his body felt more energized this morning than it had in months, he wanted more sleep in a real bed. Jeff’s addiction kept him awake for the moment, asking him to please trade in his glimpse of sobriety for the comfortable, dizzying effects of booze. He tried to keep his eyes off the empty bottle.

Jeff heard piles of details about the troops of the revolucion, how and when and where they traveled and how and when and where they’d scored victories or had their own blood spilled. How all the vehicles that were either found in the desert or which came over with transients and were abandoned by their terrified owners (
and
the ones left behind when men were killed in battle) were moved on up the road of the revolucion.

He talked about the constant thievery between the warring sides of vehicles, gasoline, guns, alcohol … Whatever else was on that list got washed over in another mental wave of whiskey for Jeff. When Paulo mentioned the alcohol, both men shot immediate glances to the bottle on the table and then back to each other, but neither mentioned it. The mere confirmation that this new world contained alcohol gave Jeff dangerous new hope and a whole new pang for liquor.

As Paulo spoke (and as Jeff wondered if this unexpected seminar was standard procedure for all the newcomers or if he was getting this classroom session because he was special in some way), he showed the same kind of calm passion Sandy Morino exhibited while talking baseball in his own office. God, Jeff thought, how would he ever explain his latest no-show to Sandy without getting fired once and for all? And what had become of the poor bastards trying to get home last night in Utah, the ones he drove his car right through? Had they all crashed? When did he get to go back?
Did
he get to?

“Guns have been the cornerstone of every major change in modern world history,” Fonseca went on, now leaning over the table and speaking directly into Jeff‘s face. “Bullets carry reform from point A to Point B, you know? And so will you, Hermano.”

Jeff doubted that seriously, but didn’t say so. Instead, he just kept sitting there trying to look interested but uncommitted, something he was good at. Paulo fixated himself on Jeff’s gleaming new firearms, and the guns’ owner began to consider the weight of Fonseca’s words. Whether or not Jeff could or would make a change in this place, it sounded like a quick and not necessarily painless way to die. He wondered if Paulo had any inkling of just how different the two of them were. Like he often did, Jeff suddenly blurted out the thoughts in his head, breaking his long silence.

“What makes you think I can just show up here, come flying in here on some magic carpet, and, well, know my ass from a hole in the ground? What makes you think I would? I mean, am I under arrest, have I been drafted or something, or am I free to try to find my way back out of here? Christ, I’ve never even shot a gun in my life —”

“Oh no?” Paulo cut back in. He turned to his left and walked to a metal locker in the corner of the flag side of the room. He swung the door open. The man wearing the same faded jeans and flannel he was that day out in the desert pulled out an M16 which had a dull glow of newness.

“’Member this, bro?” Paulo asked, suddenly sounding a lot more like the guy who he’d been hearing in his sleep and with whom he’d gone scrambling through the desert and jungle. Jeff did remember it. Immediately, he imagined the way the bullets drew dotted lines up the doors and the windshields of the SUVs as he unleashed them across the desert that morning. He didn’t answer.

“Look, Delaney. This ain’t the Marines. No straight lines to march in, no forms to fill out and no uniforms to starch. The guys out here, even the ones like you coming from somewhere across the way, they do it because they want to. There are plenty of addictions, Delaney (another glance toward the bottle), but none that compare to the rush of fighting for survival. You think you came here by accident? It’s no accident, bro. You didn’t just come. You came
back.
I didn’t invite you here and, no, you’re not under arrest. But that don’t mean you’re not here for a reason.”

“What’s the reason then, if I might ask?” Jeff said, showing the first signs of true emotion since he’d sat down. “Why did all this happen, how the hell did I get here and what am I supposed to do now?”

“Guess who knows the answer to all those questions, Delaney?”

“It’s Jeff —”

“Guess who can tell you why and how and for what? You. What were you doing out there that morning?” Paulo now raised the M16, winked an eye shut and aimed it toward the map on the wall. “Why’d you grab this thing out of the sand, man? Why did you come back here with guns of your own?” He opened his eye and turned to Jeff, gun still raised. “Most people that come over here from the old world either run off screaming or they walk straight into a bullet. Some eventually get it, and they join the fight. But none of them just pick up machine guns and start killing. Why don’t
you
tell
me
why you’re here?”

Jeff again didn’t answer. He just stared at the man in front of him, waiting for him to continue. “Maybe you think I was just born into this whole thing, that maybe I didn’t get here the same way you did,” Paulo said, setting the M16 on the table with the other guns and extending his right hand across the table to Jeff. “Well I did, bro. Paulo Fonseca, Los Angeles, California.”

As Jeff sheepishly shook the now smiling man’s hand without smiling himself, a tall, muscular and very tan man in jeans, T-shirt and backward baseball cap opened the door. He looked first at Fonseca, then immediately shifted his eyes down to Jeff.

“Oh shit,” the man said. “Jesus, it’s you.” Then he tore his eyes away to Fonseca again. “Man, I need to talk to you before I go out and start.” He looked nervously back to Jeff, then to the guns splayed out on the table, then back to Paulo. He quietly walked out and pulled the door closed. Jeff remembered that man immediately as well. He was the first one Jeff had locked eyes on when he had spun around that morning in the desert and saw the men with the guns all staring at him. He saw that man first because that man had looked the most like a regular modern American man by far. He looked like someone on a reality show.

The guy was much younger than Jeff, probably had a brain more suited to this kind of life-or-death environment and most certainly had a physique more suited to it. But the man had given Jeff the first feeling since being here that there really were people like him over here, and that they actually had chosen to do this, whatever this was.

Jeff had largely credited all the empty whiskey bottles in his recycling bin, and apparently even in his car (he still wondered where exactly inside his car
that
empty bottle had been found, and in which drunken stupor he had actually disposed of it in said car), for the new, brazen ways he’d been acting in recent weeks. But already, he was starting to think there was more to it than just that. He’d been drinking too much for years, but he’d only been having these strange feelings and crazed dreams since he’d been to this place.

Now he wished he could muster some of that fearlessness he’d started to feel recently. He felt like he was going to need it, even if it was just enough to get him out of here and back home. But he also sensed a feeling of belonging here, a feeling that started long before his return. They already called him Delaney here, even though he hated that, and they already knew him on sight.

“Did you want me to come back?” Jeff asked. “I mean, I can see you would probably want anyone and everyone to come back, but did you specifically want
me
to show back up for some reason? I mean, it’s nice to think that if I’m stuck here I’ll have friends to —”

“We’re not your friends. We are your brothers. La Hermandad. If you can understand that, you’ll be much better for it. And you don’t have to stay, Delaney. It’s not prison. It’s not some abduction or anything. It’s not like anyone’s going to keep secret how we do things around here, either, so unless you’re an idiot, you’ll learn fast that you can make your magic carpet go all sorts of places. Including home.”

This was the strangest job interview in history, Jeff thought. What was he supposed to do now, say yes or no? Was he supposed to sign on the dotted line, commit to some sort of training for this big attack on the men in the SUVs like Paulo was describing? And if he did go back home, would he now have to live in fear of every Range Rover and every man on a horse?

“And yes, I did want you back, Delaney. Everyone thinks you’re crazy for obvious reasons, but if you were crazy for real, why’d you not try to shoot all of us dead when you turned around that day? I wanted you back because I thought you might come back here and live to tell about it. I need people with balls enough to believe we can win this fight.”

Jeff looked pensively up at the map again, at that blob of black pins that looked like the contents of an anthill swarming south. Then he stared at the flag to his right with the bird on it, the fist and the words. And that brought Jeff back to the ever-growing list of questions he had.

“What year is it? I mean, what time and place is this? You mean to tell me I went through all this crazy shit just to get to Mexico? That’s it?”

“There is no more Mexico, Hermano,” Paulo said. “This is hell.”

- 34 -

Jeff could not steady his shaking hands.

Withdrawal was not only making his brain miserable, it was making his body unmanageable. He stared down the face of a cliff through the scope of an antiquated Springfield sniper rifle, and all he could see was a brown blur and an occasional flash of green. Each time he tried to steady his arms, the hands at the end of them would betray him and begin shaking, skewing and smudging everything down the sheer rock face and on the sparse desert floor beyond.

It was scorching hot in the hills, which cast their shadow onto the vast, cramped and rundown old city behind him. Jeff could feel the clammy chill coming off his skin that had become constant since his arrival, and the T-shirt he’d foolishly taken off and wrapped around his head was now heavy with sweat. He’d passed the point of overheating better than an hour ago and now, as he tried with all his might to be perfectly still, he couldn’t.

Forty-five minutes had passed in the cliffs, and he still hadn’t squeezed off a shot that was even close to its target. He’d barely gotten more than a glimpse of it. Jeff had begged the guy who had walked into the office earlier that morning — Simmons was his name — to let him take a few shots without being watched. If he could just make his hands stop shaking, he knew he could parlay his uncanny success at shooting the M16 that morning a few weeks ago into shooting the Springfield. But so far since Simmons had guided him out of town and into the cliffs for training, Jeff had fired about 20 shots and none of them had come close to where he thought he was aiming. Now, he’d pretty much given up. The only thing he could do right was load the thing.

Unlike the machine gun, which in his recollections didn’t feel much different than a chainsaw in his hands as it fired, the Springfield fired with an almighty jolt. In his current condition, it would have been enough to knock him off his feet had he been forced to stand. Though his brain had been trained to crave alcohol, Jeff’s body was craving only water on this afternoon. He was actually hoping Simmons would come back now, as the canteen Jeff had been given was long since empty. He had a feeling Simmons was barely sipping out of his, whatever he was doing down there on the backside of the steep up-and-down mountain peak on the edge of the desert.