Galvan had always assumed that when people talked about watching something happen in slow motion, it was just poetic bullshit. Time didn’t slow down. It might speed up, if it was pissed off enough. It might leave you behind, pass you right by. But it sure as hell wasn’t going to accommodate your petty-ass need to savor a crucial moment of your petty-ass life. Time was too busy fucking everybody over for that.
And yet.
The knife sure did seem to take forever to flash across the twenty feet separating his hand from Pescador’s body.
Long enough for Galvan to reflect short and hard on the folly of revenge.
Not long enough for him to do a goddamn thing about it.
Had the weapon been flying through a static world, the people moving as laconically as the moments, the blade would have been perfectly on target. Would have speared Pescador straight through the heart, arrested the flow of blood to his brain. The Federale would have been a corpse by the time he hit the ground, just one more body for the desert to swallow.
Situation’s dire and / when the fire end / blind men dilate / mindstates vibrate / as the planet cry rape / others ask why wait / games is high stakes / fakes and pi-rates / their lies break / like waves on the sand of time . . .
Instead, Pescador juked left, and the steel caught him in the fleshy part of the shoulder. He yelped and stumbled back a pace, not yet sure of the extent of the damage.
Galvan had no such illusions.
He had failed.
The goddamn movie spot, he thought as Pescador closed his fist around the knife, a low growl rising up his throat. He’d hit the motherfucker where every hero in every action flick ever made caught his requisite glancing bullet wound. It had never slowed a single one down.
Lights, camera, I’m fucked.
With a burst of noise and a furious backhand motion, Pescador yanked out the knife and flung it away. Galvan caught a brief glimpse of the crimson coating the blade, before the weapon was consigned to the dust.
The Federale lowered his head, locked eyes with Galvan, and marched forward.
Steady, Jess, steady. He has his orders. Motherfucker still can’t kill you.
Pescador squared off before Galvan, spread his legs, and clasped his hands behind his back. He took a deep breath, closing his eyes as he inhaled. A sense of calm fell over his face as he reopened them, as if the Federale had pushed all the pain away.
“I offered you a fair fight, cabrón,” he said, voice low and even. “Why? Because I’m a fair man. And what do you do, you pinche coward?”
He daubed a finger to the wound, showed Galvan a bloody fingertip.
“There’s no honor to you at all, Mensajero.”
He spit in the dirt, turned on his heel, then threw a lazy gesture over his shoulder at the gaggle of bikers. “Lock him down. Don’t worry, Knowles, we’re almost done here. You got my word.”
The True Natives’ president stepped forward, with two of his dudes a pace behind. He looked pissed, but he did as he’d been told: shouldered in behind Galvan and yoked both his arms into an elbow lock as efficient as any straitjacket.
Jess didn’t even bother to struggle. The reek of beer and tobacco lay heavy on Knowles’s breath, his beard; Galvan tried to enjoy it vicariously. Failed.
Roman candles whiz-banged before his eyes, and all at once, Galvan realized how light-headed he was. The paucity of food and water, maybe. Or the incremental loss of blood.
He shook his head, trying to clear it. Now was not the time to go foggy. But Galvan could practically see the clouds drifting down from the heavens to wreath his plodding brain.
A distant click as Pescador unlocked the trunk of his BMW and bent over it.
When he straightened, there was a machete in his hand.
“You ever heard of the Temple of Tenochtitlán, gringo?” Pescador asked as he sauntered back. “No? The cult of Tezcatlipoca, maybe? They’re basically the same thing.” He reassumed his position in front of Galvan, rested the machete on his good shoulder.
The sight of it sent questions rising up from Galvan’s mind, like feeble bubbles in a stew. Hadn’t he had a machete himself, sometime earlier today? Where had he gotten it, and where had it gone? Could this be the same one?
“In the days of the temple,” Pescador was saying now as he paced a little three-step circle, “the code of punishment was simple. Si tu ojo te hace pecar, sácatelo. Si tu mano te ofende, córtala. You understand, pendejo?”
Galvan did, and a dull horror began to pulse through him, as if a drummer somewhere within the depths of his body had started beating out a war rhythm.
Or a distress call.
He opened his mouth, but no words came. His tongue was swollen, useless, a fat slug writhing out its death throes in his mouth.
Pescador eyed him for a moment, then translated.
“If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out. If thine hand offends thee, cut it off.”
He hefted the machete, wrapped both fists around the hilt, and raised his chin at Knowles. “Get him on the ground. Hold out his arm. The right one.”
Before Galvan could react, Knowles kicked both his legs out from under and he was flat on his stomach, with three Natives pinning him down. He gasped for breath, inhaled a mouthful of dust, coughed it back out.
Pescador crouched inches from his head. “My boss needs you alive, Boy Scout, but he don’t need you whole. Lucky thing you’re already dickless, eh?”
The Federale stood. The machete rose into the sky, catching the last of the sun and throwing it back at the horizon. Rough hands grabbed Galvan’s arm, pulled it away from his body.
This was going to happen.
He tried to brace himself. To breathe. To gird himself against the coming pain and somehow power through it.
He’d made it through eleven brutal months of lockdown. Survived a desert full of ghouls, slave traders, and desperados. Forded a killer river. Watched his friends murdered. Crossed into his country. Where his daughter lived. Where she waited. Somewhere close by.
He’d be goddamned if he’d roll over and die for this punk delusions-of-grandeur-having cocksucker.
Galvan didn’t know where he found the wherewithal to summon words, but just as the weapon reached its apex—a fraction of a second before the Federale brought the blade whistling down—he managed to speak.
“Hey, Pescador.”
The Mexican froze, machete poised in the air, arms raised high, sweat stains and bloodstains blooming across his shirt.
“Yes, Boy Scout?”
“I’m still gonna fuckin’ kill you.”
The Federale lowered the knife, threw back his head, and roared with laughter. When he looked down at Galvan again, there were tears in his eyes.
“Oh, man,” he said, blotting one with the back of his hand. “If you say so, cabrón. Maybe you can pick up your arm and beat me to death with it, eh?”
And in one huge, circular, wood-chopping motion, he brought the machete up.
And back down.
A sickening squelch and crunch, as steel had its way with muscle and bone.
The blade was sharp and the blow true. It severed Galvan’s lower arm cleanly, two inches below the elbow.
As cleanly as possible, anyway.
He threw back his head and howled. Maybe the adrenaline lessened the pain; maybe the shock intensified it. Who the fuck knew. Galvan squeezed his eyes shut, ground his teeth, balled his fists—clenched every part of himself, trying to transform his entire being into a tourniquet, even as the blood flowed from him.
Fist.
Not fists. Fist.
Singular.
Though he could swear he felt them both.
“There’s a blowtorch in my trunk,” Pescador barked, swinging the machete back onto his shoulder and tossing his keys to the nearest biker. “Cauterize that shit, and hurry.”
He started to stroll away, then stopped when he saw Betty. She was shaking uncontrollably, tears streaming down her face, one hand extended toward Galvan in a helpless gesture of sympathy.
The Federale looked her up and down, and smiled. “Somebody escort this one to my car. I’ll give her a ride.”
It wasn’t until the blue flame began searing into his flesh that Galvan passed out.