At least, that was what Barney thought he saw. Funny, he could smell burning flesh, but he couldn’t feel his hands at all.
The next thing Barney saw were the maggots, busily feeding on his hands, where his index fingers used to live. That was all right. The little buggers would eat the necrotic tissue. They were nasty, but they were protein. He might eat them himself, if he ever woke up again.
Surely this was less traumatic than being shot in the head.
Maybe that came next.
Of all his freedom scenarios, Barney had not anticipated leaving the place he had come to call the Bleeding Room on his face, being dragged by one foot.
A foot that was no longer encased in the unforgiving leg shackle.
Assorted parasites had been at work on the rawed flesh of his leg. Where the cuff had secured him now felt like a third degree burn.
He was experiencing pain, and was therefore alive, perhaps delirious. One of his eyes was swollen shut and crusted. His skeleton felt disconnected. Wounds everywhere. Teeth rocking in their gum beds. Brain hammering. Heart still pumping, blood still moving, even if a lot of it was vacating the premises. Dizziness, disorientation. He felt he had puked and shat so much that if you looked down his throat, you’d see light.
They — someone — dragged his dead ass out, down steps. Sacked his head. Stinky bag, probably the same one from his earlier trip. He was in the van again, the one in which he and Carl had been taken. Carl’s past few pay periods, by comparison, had probably been less debilitating. This time, he was not around to grab Barney’s hand and drag him up out of the smothering sand.
The unseen road trip that followed was not measurable in units of time. The only clock Barney possessed was his own heartbeat. It could have been a week. He had to remain inside of himself, sequestered. He thought of his organs, stubbornly churning away in spite of the memo that came down saying just die. Maybe they were taking him to a clínica. Maybe they were driving him home. Maybe Sucio had slipped up, gone overboard, and now they had to doctor him.
Yeah, right.
More bumpy roads and more roughhouse dragging. When the bag was yanked off his head Barney was staring bleary-eyed at the Rio Satanas, from the top of the bridge. Sucio was sporting a bandage beneath a patch on one eye. The glowering orb of the setting sun made everything shade crimson and blurred Barney’s own light-sensitive vision, but he recognized Mojica, standing back a pace, politic. He did not feel the usual waves of animal hatred broiling off Sucio; the big man seemed to have clamped down and toughened up, all business, curses shelved, silent again.
Sucio grabbed Barney by the scruff and the crotch and heaved him over the edge. No parting insult, no quip. Barney hit the oil-sheened surface of the mulchy water inelegantly and headfirst, sinking to brush the tar-like aggregate bottom, sucking a lungful of turbid liquid with floating chunks in it, then slowly ascending from his own buoyancy toward filtered light. He had a flash thought of his goldfish, under Armand’s stewardship, back in another world called Los Angeles. If you didn’t clean the aquarium for a couple of months and allowed the mold and algae to build up, shut off the filtration system so the fish were swimming in ammoniac piss and liquefied gray shit, then dunked your entire head into the tank, it would probably be a lot like this.
Back on the bridge a brief discourse ensued in Spanish between Mojica and Sucio concerning the number of minutes left to Barney’s life. Barney caught bits of it as he bobbed, water draining from one ear while it filled the other. One said Barney was dead, the other said Barney wasn’t, and it went back and forth, in the manner of gang taunts, no matter either way, a kind of yes-he-is, no-he’s-not time-passer.
Barney could imagine the sizzling fire-coal deep in Sucio’s good eye. He’d had hurt the huge enforcer, hurt him visibly and humiliatingly, and nobody hurt Sucio, that was clearly a rule in their world.
Barney floated on the surface, face-down, no bubbles.
“Mira,” said Mojica. “Muerte, carnal.”
Sucio unlimbered his revolver, aimed down at the floating body, and spent all six rounds.
Barney rotated in the water, surrounded by a corona of freshly freed blood.
“Now he is,” said Sucio, turning back to the van.
A disembodied woman’s voice seemed to ask Barney, Where are my children?
He had holes in him; that much he knew. He was hit. He had been hit a few times before, in his previous life.
Shock trauma took over once he ran dry of endorphins; he could not feel a thing. Bullet impact had flipped him over in the water, and instead of drowning, he was more or less afloat and still drawing air along with the occasional mouthful of sewage. He rejected the bilge. Autonomic functions had taken over and he did not think about willfully breathing. He worried in the abstract about taking on water — holes in a rowboat could sink it — but for the most part he was far away from his physical body, occasionally observing it from the distant place to which his mind had been exiled. But all he could see was the sky at dusk. The world seemed aflame.
The Rio Satanas was devilish in its commitment to seek the sea, or other, fresher tributaries. Sunrise, sunset and the tidal pull of the moon exerted their influence to provide a kind of current. He revolved, in the manner of a lazy sunbather in a hotel pool. He saw the ransom bridge receding, only once, before it became too dark to gauge distance.
This is how life ends.
Life ends not in triumph and fulfillment, but depletion and ignominy. Barney was used up, tapped out, leaking sentience from holes in his body, run dry of humanity, reduced to a kind of absurd chattel for the amusement of psychopaths. Alive or dead, he no longer existed; perhaps never existed before, except as a shade of himself, a suggestion of a person, a conglomeration of tics and traits and moot statistics, none quite diverting. It is easy to blow large holes in a tissue-thin simulacrum of life.
His murderers had not only denied his humanity, but contravened his existence. He was not important enough to keep, nor unimportant enough to cut free. He was nothing, and the universe at large did not care about teaching him spurious moral lessons. Given a fresh, whole body and a set of guns, he could destroy everyone who ever did him wrong, but what would that change? Nothing. Because he was nothing; he mattered not, on the big scale.
There was no balance to restore. Nobody would care. He was not a religious man; pie in the sky by and by when you die. He had structured his life so that he was never owed anything by anyone, so by what right would he claim recompense?
Again his fractured perception registered the distant sound of a woman in tears. A locaclass="underline" “¡O hijos mios!” Perhaps Barney was a lost child, floating home.
I have no one, the Old Assassin had told him. I care for no one. And I’m cared for by no one. So all I have is what I can do.
Barney could not do anything except bob along in the disgusting mulch of the river. Perceptions ebbing. The quick hallucination, dream, or flashback. Not like the legend — no clip reel of your life’s deeds and misdeeds unspooling before your semi-conscious mind; no tunnel of light; zero choir. The dull pulse of biologically blocked pain, radiating like a distant, dying sun.
This is how life ends.
Life ends when you are totally free.
Something was chewing on his foot. Maybe a sump rat the size of a terrier; maybe one of those monster catfish from the Amazon, a nine-foot-long killer mutated by the toxic waste in the river.