Luck and Death at the Edge of the World

Twenty-One: From The Throats Of Men, From The Hearts Of Men

The shower in the Cordoba feels like distilled bliss. The sweat stuck to my body washes down the drain, and with it goes the funky stink I’ve developed over the last few hours, a combination of perspiration, adrenaline, and the odors of El Paraíso.

Feeling refreshed, I decide to stay the night after all and lie down on the bed to try to sleep. It’s early evening outside and the sounds of the city come in through the open balcony door, the warm breeze making the curtains waft, casting shadows on the walls. I hear cars, animated voices, faint music from ten stories down.

I drift into a light doze and the room’s elements morph in my sleep. The bulging, shifting shadows transform themselves into Forces soldiers: shored up by Brace, faceless, fearless, godless, loveless. A woman’s voice from the street loses its happiness, rising in volume, then in intensity, then turns into a shriek. The light from the streetlamps and the nearby advertising holos turn the room a fantastic red – like fire, like blood – the color of fear.

The exhaust from cars outside becomes the wafting, bitter odor of Angelfire, of houses burning as lives and belongings go up in flames. The whole of Tijuana is full of smoke, filled with the smell of burning wood and burning meat: pigs, chickens, humans, horses. I hear laughter, but it isn’t the innocent laughter of the Mexico City street, the kind that lulled me to sleep. It’s a laughter with nothing inside at all. At its heart is the most frightening void there is – nothing human, nothing alive, nothing but the absence of life, nothing but the huge empty entropy of death soaking up everything around it. What scares me the most is that it comes from the throats of men, from the hearts of men. Not from some monster, some myth, it comes from us.

The woman’s shriek won’t stop, won’t stop, won’t stop. I’m in the middle of the action, standing in the street with people running everywhere – killing, dying, trying to escape, trying to fight back – but there’s nothing I can do. With the Brace in my system my conscience is disconnected from my body. Along with the others I burn, shoot, kick, cut, spit, while the real me, the one that cares, that loves, rides like an unwilling passenger inside the head of the monster I’ve become. I shout at my Braced self, commanding it to stop, but it won’t. I scream, scream again, more, louder. My voice mixes with the woman’s scream, becomes one with it.

Tijuana was a Deploy and Destroy. We used pure terror to crush the population back into docility – women and children first. There was no plan, as such. Just get down there and fuck them up. Lasers that can cut a man open and spill his guts into his own hands. Angelfire that clings to the skin and keeps burning right down to the bone, even under water. Airborne mines that float like jellyfish at head height, set off by the air currents created whenever some unlucky civilian strayed near. Hell, fucking garotte them if you want to. Get down to the old stuff. Bring a samurai sword, build a gallows, crucify. Whatever turns you on. Let your worst, blackest impulses run wild, the predatory animal that floats in the ancestral consciousness of every man.

We weren’t attacking the military because there was no military force opposing us – Guiterrez had the MXAF and other forces stand down so we could do our work – this was strictly population control. Leave no family untouched, no home undamaged. Break their bones, spirits, sanity. When we were finished, what was left of the population was back under control – deeply and sickeningly under control. They buried their dead, tended to their wounded and insane, and went back to their fields and factories

But in my dream, the battle never reaches its conclusion. It simply rolls on, ever and ever on, to the booming drumbeat of mortars and the high, pure note of a child’s scream – every child’s scream – a symphony of distilled sadism that has sucked us all inside of it, perpetrators and victims alike.

I fly awake and roll quickly off the bed, stifling a sound in my throat as I assume a battle stance, ready to defend myself against the shadows on the wall. Behind me the street noises have resumed their normal tenor. People laugh, talk, shout happily... music plays and car horns blare at one another. Another night of partying in the shuttered community of hotels in the heart of Mexico City. Tijuana is far away.