GPS (32 page)

In its aftermath was only the sound of the frantic deer tearing off into the darkening thickets of trees and brush. Then there was dead silence, interrupted only by the breeze, the hum of locusts and Josh Simmons’ voice in his head, urging him to hurry up, that horse won’t stay out there forever.

He didn’t realize he’d hit one of the deer until about 10 minutes later, when he staggered into the clearing and saw a scarlet trail of blood on the ground. It wasn’t anything like one of those hunting shows on TV which Jeff always found to be as pointless as he found hunting itself. There was no big search or chase for this prey. The deer he’d shot, a doe, was dead and still, and only about 20 yards past the clearing. He was immediately washed over in pity for the animal, and in fact thought of Lefty when he saw the deer’s blank black eye looking up at him. He wondered if Lefty was still alive.

That feeling was replaced by the notion that he should eat more of the peyote, get further zonked and see what happened then. Dinner, he thought, this was supposed to be dinner, and for the first time he got the sense maybe Paulo and his men actually needed this to be dinner. Maybe he would just spend the rest of the afternoon sitting out here, and then try to drag the dead deer all the way home tonight. Was that even possible, especially with a bum leg?

He turned his back on the animal, sat down and pulled the cloth bag back out of the backpack. Jeff popped another of the green buttons into his mouth and worked it into his cheek with his tongue like a ballplayer. Again, he smiled, imagining the drugs slowly draining into him all day. He decided he would eat all of the peyote, trip his balls off, and if this world or his old world didn’t want or need him anymore after that, so be it.

He sat in a daze for nearly another hour before being interrupted by the unmistakable sound of gunshots in the distance. He leapt to his feet with a dull thud of pain in his leg and began scrambling around, his field of vision and his body swaying madly back and forth as he did. Once he was sure he wasn’t the target, Jeff decided he wanted to move on up the incline, maybe find out who was shooting what, and maybe do some more shooting of his own.

He wrestled the deer carcass onto his blanket, wrapped it up like a giant burrito and tied knots at both ends. He had no idea what else might come along to find it, but had crazed thoughts of being attacked by a pack of coyotes while he tried to drag the thing back home, and decided to just leave it right there for now. They could eat through the blanket if they really wanted it.

As the light quickly faded under the umbrella of firs, Jeff staggered farther up the incline and into the dim forest. In the distance, he sensed a sharp drop-off, as the tree line and the ground seemed to disappear, and he hoped he wouldn’t simply trudge right over the side of a cliff. Every few minutes, he stopped and sat, the drug taking him under deeper and deeper as he did.

There was a cliff ahead, as it turned out, but instead of falling off, Jeff perched himself on the rocks at its edge and peered over it as the sun set. He no longer trusted his brain, or his eyes, and he felt like reality was about to leave him completely. He thought he saw tire tracks in the sandy ravine below, but the dying light and the drugs made it tough to see for certain.

The thing that made him certain, minutes later, was the unmistakable sight of approaching headlights down below and the sound of tires crunching into dry earth.

- 38 -

For the third consecutive day, Jeff awoke with his body aching. A persistent tapping sound had begun to stir him, then a feeling of shaking back and forth and finally, a gamy, bloody stench.

When he forced his cemented eyes open, he reared back with a gasp. The first thing Jeff saw was Paulo Fonseca, banging on the driver’s side window and peering into the car in which Jeff was sitting. Jeff’s hands were clenching the steering wheel in front of him. It was sweltering inside the car — which he now noticed had a little Range Rover emblem on the steering wheel — and the smell of blood and death made Jeff gag.

He swung open the apparently locked door and fell to the pavement next to Paulo, who was speechless but who had volumes of questions etched onto his face. Jeff vomited uncontrollably for what felt like 10 minutes before forcing himself up, looking at Paulo and wiping his chin. Another day had apparently come and gone, and as was too often the case, Jeff couldn’t exactly remember what had happened to get to this point.

“Hey Paulo,” he said calmly.

“Sweet Jesus, bro! What in the hell is going on?” Paulo lunged forward, climbed into the SUV and snatched a GPS off the windshield and began frantically pushing its buttons. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus! What did you do, Delaney?”

“Oh, right,” Jeff said, looking around for the first time and realizing he was in the stadium parking lot. He rubbed his eyes and breathed deeply. “Dinner, right? Yeah, it’s in the back, I think.”

Jeff wasn’t intentionally smart-assing a completely bewildered Paulo, he just didn’t possess enough energy at the moment to do anything more than talk softly and move slowly. He could barely hold his arms up, and his knees buckled beneath him constantly. In his mind and behind his eyes were the aftershocks and splintery fireworks that were the remnants of what seemed an endless barrage of manic thoughts and actions. He didn’t remember anything he had done specifically, but his collaborative vision of the previous night was filled with tirades of shooting, screaming, sweating and even laughing. He remembered the animal sounds, the grunts and growls that came from him and from the shadows everywhere around him.

Paulo looked at Jeff in confusion, almost torment, and then threw the GPS onto the driver’s seat and yanked the keys out of the ignition. He hurried to the back of the truck and pulled open the rear hatch. When he did, he emitted more of the same sorts of gasps he’d been uttering since he first walked into the parking lot with his gun raised to see how and why a black Freemen Brigade Rover was parked there.

“Jesus God almighty, Delaney. Jesus Christ in heaven, what did you do?”

Jeff’s T-shirt, he noticed as he looked down at himself, was crusted in dried, browning blood. Paulo stood in silence for a moment as he stared into the back of the truck, seemingly not knowing what words to use to describe what he was seeing. Jeff simply felt numb. He didn’t have the guilt or the depression that often followed such massive trips as the one he’d apparently been on for the last day or so. He didn’t know what time it was, and didn’t dare ask, but felt pretty sure he hadn’t skipped an entire day this time like he did the first time he’d GPSed his way into this place.

Paulo didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he began pulling at the knots at the ends of the giant, bulging blanket, which was saturated in blood from one end to the other and which was filling the entire rear of the truck. Holding one hand over his mouth and cringing, Paulo pulled at the blanket with his other hand until the contents finally slid out and onto the parking lot pavement in a massive, squishing, disgusting heap. Paulo leapt out of their path as they tumbled out.

Two other men now approached the SUV, looking every bit as frightened as Paulo. Jeff stood in silence, now wondering himself what else had been wrapped in the blanket, and began to inch slowly around the truck for a clear view. It was more than the deer which he dully remembered killing. Joining the deer were two coyotes and the body of a man, all jumbled together in a knot of limbs, torsos and heads.

“See Paulo? Every time he shows up things go crazy,” one of the two onlookers said, squinting at the pile of bodies. “He’s nuts, man.” He turned to Jeff. “You’re nuts, man.”

Jeff shrugged his shoulders. “I did what I had to. Everything happens for a reason.”

- 39 -

Instead of making the long drive south and east with Paulo and the others that day, Jeff was told maybe he should go back home for a few days. It seemed the unlikeliest thing that could happen at this point, but he wasn’t inclined to argue. Yet, he wasn’t nearly as excited as he expected to be about returning home now. In fact, he questioned Fonseca up and down about how long they’d be gone, where they would go next after Victoria and when he was expected back.

“I don’t expect anything, Delaney,” he told Jeff in the same room under the stadium with the map and the flag. “Like I keep telling you, this is all up to you. No one’s gonna go across to make sure you do or don’t do anything. I want you here, need you here, but I need you here as sober and as level-headed as a guy like you can be.”

The last time Jeff sat in this room, he longed for a drink, and had ignored better than half of what Paulo had explained to him about the war. Now he wished he could ask Paulo to tell him everything again because now he wanted to know. Too late, he figured.

“So you want me to leave, then? Did I do something wrong?” Jeff’s questions made him sound pathetic, like he was being jilted out of something. He was confused, not knowing what he should be asking for or hoping for. The home he’d spent so much time pining for the last couple of days offered nothing but misery. And while they might not have matched the type of trouble that was out here, there were plenty of problems waiting for him at home.

For one, he would undoubtedly get fired, or maybe already
had
been fired. His personal life had long since been drowned in whiskey, and that whiskey had long since become his only reason for waking up every morning. Everyone he cared about was long gone. Sandy Morino was likely disparaging Jeff now, ruing the day he’d hired him.

“You don’t gotta leave,” Fonseca said. “I’m just saying I think it would be best. I don’t need you jumping from one addiction to another. Let it happen slowly. As crazy as things get out there in the desert, I know you can’t beat crazy with crazy. Even in your most intense moments, like when you and Simmons came up on that Rover, you’ve got to keep a level head. You need to understand that you don’t just have to take orders in this army. You have to
want
to. The reason all these guys are out here risking their hides is because they want to. I’ve been telling you that all along, and I’ll keep telling you that until you can see it for yourself.”

The idea of getting out of there was naturally a comforting one in many ways to Jeff. He didn’t want to know what had happened with the collection of carcasses he’d brought back to camp, didn’t want to think about who he’d killed, how many he’d killed in all, and how in the hell he was able to make it back to the stadium in a Range Rover he should have probably been killed trying to steal. He feared how much more heat he might have brought on the revolucion army by doing it, and had no idea if he’d been followed back by the FB.

For some reason, Paulo didn’t seem to be wondering about any of those things because he never once asked Jeff anything more about any of it. He’d just summed it all up by suggesting Jeff go home and cool out for a little while. This place was a real life video game, apparently, one you could just switch off if things got too tough. But you only got one life in this game.

Maybe it was time for Jeff to stop questioning it all, something he faintly remembered telling himself on his hallucinatory hunting trip the day before. Maybe it was time to start listening to someone other than himself for the first time in his life, to stop talking and start doing. Don’t promise, just do, as Sandy always said to him.

“You need to know how to leave again, anyway,” Fonseca went on. “You need to know how to use your GPS to go back and forth so you really can decide what to do next, and when to do it. As for all your questions, we’ll be outside Victoria for the next couple of weeks, probably, trying to stage the hit on Destinoso. If you’re gonna be with us for that, you want to get your ass back over here as soon as you can, and if I didn’t want you back, you wouldn’t know anything about any of that shit. Not everyone who’s ever come over here and stayed has been in on the shit that you’re in on.

“Anyway, I’ll give you the coordinates to get back. Hell, I’ll even program them into your GPS so you won’t forget them. And then it’s all up to you.” Paulo walked over to the map, eyeing the sea of black pins swarming to the south. “Looks like tough odds, huh? Well, you should have seen it two months ago, Delaney. A year ago. You might think we’re the crazy ones, and maybe we are, but we’re starting to create our own bodies out there, and with help from the right people, we can start to pull some of these black pins back out and never put them back.

“If you decide you don’t wanna be with us, then say bye-bye to the GPS. Throw it out the window, put it in a dumpster or bury the goddamn thing. Doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna show up on your doorstep or anything.”

As if to make his point even firmer, Paulo did grab one of the black pins out of the map. He turned and flicked it into the air and onto the table in front of Jeff, who picked it up and turned it over and over in his hands. It seemed like every time he sat in this chair, he was being asked to make some sort of commitment.

“So how do I get back home then?” he asked, realizing again that everything that came out of his mouth here was a question, but also knowing that there were plenty of answers he would need one way or the other. “And, I mean, what happens? Does time stand still over there when I’m over here, or does it just keep moving?”

“Of course it keeps moving,” Paulo said. “You can’t stop the ticking clock no matter where you are. Like I keep telling you, this isn’t Mars.”

“So then, I guess I’ve missed all kinds of shit on the other side, haven’t I?” Jeff asked, already knowing the answer to that one. He thought of his unpaid rent, unattended baseball games and God knew what else.