‘Mules coming down.’
‘Yeah, so I see.’
Conversation was exhausted between the two of them, they’d both been on the same duty every day for the last two weeks, the same dawn to mid-afternoon shift. The boss was twitchy, he wanted the place locked down tight, no unnecessary changing of the guard. The two of them watched in silence as the solitary figure and the two mules picked their way down the concertina turns of the path in the early morning sun. It was a common enough sight, and anyway, you couldn’t be surprised down here in daylight, except maybe by snipers or a fucking airstrike.
Even when the mule driver and his animals made it onto the last few hairpin twists before the bridge, Miguel didn’t tense as such. But a flicker of interest woke on his weathered face. Behind him, he heard Lucho get to his feet off the rock.
‘Isn’t that Sumariva’s mule, leading?’
Miguel shaded his eyes. ‘Looks like it. But that sure isn’t Sumariva. Way too big. And look at the way he’s walking.’
It was fair comment. The tall figure clearly didn’t have the hang of coming down a mountain path. He jolted heavily, scudding up powdery white dust every couple of steps. Seemed to be walking with a limp too, and he didn’t appear to have much idea of how to lead the mules. Big modern boots and a long coat plastered with the dust of his ungainly descent, battered leather Stetson. Beneath the brim of the hat, a face flashed pale. Miguel grunted.
‘It’s a fucking gringo,’ he said curiously.
‘You think…’
‘Don’t know. Supposed to be looking out for some black guy, not a gringo and a couple of mules. Maybe this is someone from the university. A lot of those guys are from the north, doing survey experiments down here for Mars. Testing equipment.’
The mules did appear, now that he looked, to be loaded with small, shallow-draft crates that winked metallic in the high-angled slant of the sun.
‘Well he ain’t fucking testing it around here,’ said Lucho, unshipping his shotgun with a youthful glower. He pumped a round into the chamber and stepped onto the bridge planking. Miguel winced wearily at the sound.
‘Just let him come to us, all right. No sense rushing up to meet him, and there’s no space to do a search on that side anyway. Let him get across to this side, then we’ll see who he is, turn him around and send him on his way.’
But when the gringo got to the bridge, he didn’t come out onto the planks immediately. Instead, he stopped and sent one of the mules across ahead of him. The animal made the crossing with accustomed docility, while back on the other side the gringo in the hat seemed more concerned with searching his pockets and fiddling with the webbing straps across the other animal’s back.
‘This is Sumariva’s mule,’ Lucho said as the animal clopped solemnly up to them, then past and onto the solid ground of the river bank, where it stood and waited for its owner to catch up. ‘You think he’d loan it out like that?’
‘For enough cash, yeah. Wouldn’t you?’ Miguel shifted to Spanish, raised his voice. ‘Hoy you, you can’t come down here. This is private property.’
The figure at the other end of the bridge waved an arm. The voice came back in Quechua. ‘Just give me a minute, will you.’
Then he started to lead the other mule out onto the bridge. Hat tilted down over his eyes
‘All right, you stay here,’ Miguel told the boy. The language had floored him, he’d never met a gringo before who spoke it. ‘I’ll go see what this is about.’
‘You want me to call it in?’
Miguel glanced at the mule standing there like the most ordinary thing in the world. It blinked back at him out of big liquid eyes. He grunted impatiently.
‘Nah, don’t bother. Not like they won’t hear it, if we have to shoot this guy.’
But he unslung his shotgun, and he went out to meet the new arrival with the vague crawl of unease in him. And he slowed as he closed the last few metres of the rapidly shrinking gap between himself and the advancing stranger. Came to a stop near the middle of the bridge, stood athwart and pumped a round of his own into the shotgun in his hands.
The stranger stopped at the dry rack-clack of the action.
‘That’ll do,’ Miguel said, in Quechua. ‘Didn’t you hear me? This is private fucking property.’
‘Yeah, I know that.’
‘So what the fuck are you doing down here, gringo?’
‘I’m here to see the witch.’
That was when the stranger tipped up his head so Miguel could see his face properly. It was also when he realised he’d made a mistake The white they’d seen flashing under the hat brim as he came down the path above was pasty and unreal, clotted and streaked on the face like a poorly applied clown’s mask, or a half-melted Day of the Dead candy skull. The eyes were dark and impassive, and they stared out of the disintegrating white face with no more humanity than a pair of gun muzzles
Pistaco.
Miguel had time for that single quailing thought, and then something erupted behind him in a string of firecracker fury. He looked up, tugged both ways at once, and the stranger’s long dusty coat split opened and he had a flash glimpse of some stubby, ugly weapon cradled there in the pistaco’s arms.
Deep throat-clearing cough, spiteful, shredding whine.
Then there was only impact, a sense of being tugged violently backward, a split second of the sky and Colca’s steep-angled sides tilting and spinning, and then everything was gone.
Carl Marsalis sprinted past the ruins of the first familia gunman, closed the gap with the second while the other man raised his shotgun and snapped off a useless blast from the hip. This one was already panicked beyond any professional combat training he might have had, the remote-triggered firecrackers in the lead mule’s panniers, the sudden explosive death of his comrade. Carl ran in firing, too far out for the sharkpunch to have any serious impact yet, but the boy ahead of him flinched and staggered with the few shards that found their mark.
It wasn’t an ideal weapon for the circumstances, and out of the water it was too fucking heavy for comfort. He’d had to drape the long elastic sling it came with around his neck, and stick a cling patch on his right thigh to hold the damn thing still under his coat. His leg ached with the extra effort of walking with the weight. But the patented Cressi sharkpunch had the sterling advantage that it was classed as subaqua sports equipment, which meant he’d got it through security in his baggage without a second look, when second looks were the last thing he needed. And a gun that punched razor-sharp spinning slivers of alloy through water hard enough to eviscerate a great white shark did have some considerable reach in air, even if the spread made accuracy a joke. The young guard had blood running down his face as he fumbled at the slide on his shotgun. He was probably dazed from the sound of the explosions, he was clearly terrified.
Carl closed the gap, pulled the trigger on the sharkpunch again. The boy slammed back against the side cables of the bridge. Large chunks of him slopped through and fell into the river, the rest collapsed skeletally onto the suddenly blood-drenched planking.
Over.
The mule carrying the firecrackers had, not unreasonably, panicked as much as anybody else. She was headed up the path along the riverside, bucking and snorting. No time to hang about. Carl loped after the animal, ears open for the sounds of other humans.
He met a third gunman a couple of hundred metres along the river, hurrying down the path towards the sounds of gunfire, a matt-grey Steyr assault rifle held unhandily across his body as he jogged. The man saw the mule, tried to get out of its way, and Carl darted round one side of the animal, threw out the sharkpunch and fired more or less blind. The other man went down as if ripped apart by invisible hands. Carl scanned the path up ahead, saw and heard nothing, and stopped by the ruins of the man he’d just killed. He crouched and scooped the Steyr up left-handed out of the mess, dumped it immediately with a grunt of frustration. The guy had still been holding it across his body when Carl shot him and the anti-shark load had smashed the breech beyond repair.