THE TRAIL BECAME AN UNPAVED ROAD AGAIN OUT IN THE FLAT. For fear of traffic, Felipo led her away from the road and up a ridge to camp out of sight against the pine forest at the foot of a hill. As promised, they were up before sunrise. The horses were fidgety and recalcitrant as Felipo saddled them. “Do you smell that?” he asked Luz. And she did. Smoke. They set out on foot, leading the animals along the ridge with the reins in their hands. The scent grew stronger.
“Maybe the army burns the mota,” Felipo ventured. “Maybe the farmers burn back their own crops. You can’t be sure if it even matters. Do not worry.”
But as the light rose, so did a column of black smoke, ahead and to the south, drifting with the wind. Midmorning, they discovered the skeleton of a barn situated on a dirt road, down across an expanse of arid ground. The distant frame beams were charred, and fire had licked into a wheat field beyond it, carpets of flame so hot they were nearly clear.
A black pickup truck was parked in the foreground near the barn. The truck’s doors hung open. Four dark heaps lay on the ground around the truck. The bodies were far off—Luz estimated nearly three hundred meters—but they both saw it, clearly, when one of the forms raised an arm, as if to wave to them.
Felipo looked at Luz, then began to lead Canguro down the ridge toward the barn and the truck and the bodies.
“No,” Luz hissed.
“One of them is alive,” he said. “Maybe they had an accident. Maybe I can help.”
“Don’t,” she said. And her own firmness, her willingness to believe it, surprised her: “They are dead.”
Felipo glanced again. The fire behind the bodies. Luz saw it in his face—the memory of the evening when his house had collapsed in flames and his parents lay dead on the lawn. “I’m sorry,” Felipo said. He shrugged and started down the loose slope of the ridge, pulling the horse. “Wait here if you like.”
Luz watched him go. “Shit,” she said in English, then she tugged on Pegaso’s reins and followed.
The heat was monumental. Grasshoppers fleeing the fire pelted against them, stinging Luz’s face and arms and sticking to her shirt. Pegaso shook his head and snorted and began to resist her pull. She whispered to him, tried to sound confident, but cold slipped between her ribs as it became clear that there had been no accident. The truck’s windows circled the vehicle in glass beads, and a sequence of narrowly spaced bullet holes checkmarked the body of the truck.
The low roar of the fire canceled out most other noise, and she didn’t hear the truck still idling until they were almost next to it. A handgun lay on the driver’s seat. Of the bodies, which were off a short way behind the truck, she couldn’t tell which one had waved. They all seemed to be dead by now. The nearest man lay cruciform, head twisted toward them, sand caked against his bloody rictus and the fresh red laceration through his lips.
“I’m sorry,” Felipo said. “I thought they could be the farmers. I’m sorry, Luz. You were right.” Felipo was pulling Canguro around, starting back for the ridge and the hills and the pine forest.
Something snapped overhead, a quick atmospheric twitch. Luz felt it as much as she heard it. Another snap. The briefest whistle of split air. Luz’s memory toned before the reports reached her. She dropped facedown in the dirt. Felipo pointed and shouted. Her eyes rolled heavily toward the Jeep tearing down the next hill, returning.
She got to her feet and pulled on Pegaso’s reins, but the horse wouldn’t budge. The big animal locked his knees and stared into some other place. Luz pulled on the reins, but it was as if they were lashed to a boulder. She saw the blood on the horse’s breast, rich and nearly black, spreading through his gray coat. She reached and grabbed hold of the bridle but the horse wouldn’t move, wouldn’t turn his skull. Felipo shoved her and she stumbled and straightened and looked at him.
She heard a sighing deep in her eardrums, like air being let out, and then something popped in the center of her brain, and all the sound around her crystallized—the low roar of the fire, the snap and bite of another rifle round, Felipo screaming:
“Run, Luz, run!”
She turned and accelerated into her sprint, her ghost runner a step behind. She sensed him reaching, extending his arm, grasping at her in an effort to trip her up. She lengthened her strides. Her soles found tenuous purchase in the dry crust of earth. Her heart thumped at a quicker rate than she could recycle her feet. It was a discordant, out-of-order feeling.
The Jeep leveled onto the trail. Dust plumed as it raced toward the skeletal barn and the bodies.
Head turned, Luz sprawled, full body crashing into the slope of the ridge. She scrambled to her feet. Felipo wasn’t with her.
He had remained with the horses, still yanking on Pegaso’s reins, attempting to get the wounded horse moving by throwing his whole body into it. She screamed his name, and a cramp razored across her lower abdomen, crooking her spine and folding her in half. A hot swell of nausea.
The Jeep skidded to a stop near the barn. Three men leaped out. Felipo let go of Pegaso’s reins and broke for where he had his shotgun sheathed along Canguro’s flank. He was pulling it free when the first man hit him, spearing him to the dirt. The gun spun away. The other men arrived and fell onto the boy, fists rising and falling.
Luz groaned. The pain in her stomach unclenched and she straightened. The men pulled Felipo to his feet. The boy hung limply between them. One of the men raised an arm in Luz’s direction, and another began loping toward her.