Friday, April 23, 1937.
1700 Hours.
Town Barracks.
By the time I woke up, Torito was missing, as usual.
Still no sign of Tuerto anywhere. More fodder for the Lieutenant to use against me later on, I was sure. It was still early, but we had to pull a double shift that evening anyway. I could feel my face and eyes puffy from my almost useless nap. You can't pretend to cram three days of sleep in five hours of rest. You just wake up more tired than before. But I'm digressing.
I was already preparing to wake up Camarada to go look for Torito at the Zurito when the man himself appeared through the door. True to his nickname, he was fuming with anger. Something had happened.
"You're early," I commented, but only got a dismissive wave as a response.
"Couldn't concentrate," he mentioned, "the lack of sleep is getting to me."
"You mentioned that earlier."
"Yes, well," said Torito as he plummeted on his straw bed, "now it's serious."
At some point, we managed to wake Camarada up with our chatter, given that he was sitting up on his own bed.
"Lack of sleep can mess with your performance," said Camarada with a deadpanned expression.
It was an innocent comment, but it seemed to make Torito more irritated and mad. He threw away his satchel and punched his bed in frustration. "No, no. It's not that. The Torito doesn't suffer from any performance issues. It's this fucking noise."
"Yes," said Camarada as he stood up, "artillery fire does get annoying after a while."
"Not that," said Torito. "it was different."
I remembered he mentioned something about a scrapping noise earlier that day. Maybe it was our minds playing games with us. We were sleep deprived, almost starved, and constantly on edge. At that time, several people had gone mad. Some tried to escape, only to be caught either by us or by the revolutionary forces. Some tried to fake an illness, or even go as far as to injure themselves to have an excuse not to fight. But in such wars, every man had to stand his ground.
Of course, when you apply such pressure to a man, with no way out, you can understand how attractive the barrel of a gun seems to be. Peace at the pull of a trigger. The easy way out.
After all, the wait was the worst part.
"What noise?" asked Camarada.
It was actually quite rare to have them both talk to eachother without trying tear their eyes out, so I just made myself blend into the background to see how things went.
"It was like...music."
"Most people like to have some music while they-" Camarada started to say, but Torito started to screech a syncopated tune that made both Camarada and me reel back.
"Stop!" yelled Camarada, making Torito smile wickedly.
"Didn't you like the beautiful background music to my lovemaking?" said Torito. "Now, imagine that inside my head. I had to run from there."
"And it stopped?" I asked.
"That's the weird thing," said Torito. "As I went further away from the Zurito, the music became fainter and fainter. I can't even hear it right now."
"Weird," said Camarada.
Weird indeed. It didn't occur to me at the time to connect his noise to my noise or to realize that the same thing happened to me earlier when I was walking through town. Hindsight is a curse. But Torito did notice it. He was the brains in our group, but I was the leader. The responsibility of the events following that day were, and are still, on my shoulders.
"Anyways, I'm going to sleep and see if this goes away," said Torito as he laid in a ball on his bed.
I didn't want to break it to him that we had a double shift that night. I just let him sleep that extra hour before we headed out.
Our shift began around 1800 hours or so. Torito fell asleep almost as soon as we relieved the previous squad, leaving me and Camarada alone. Now, I said before that he didn't tend to talk much, but that night he was particularly chatty about a certain theory of his.
"I'm telling you," he said as he leaned towards the bonfire that kept us warm. "he deserted."
"I sincerely doubt it," I said. And I meant it. Tuerto was a gentle soul, but he was not a coward. Cowards didn't have scars on their bodies but on their souls. "You heard Father Maximino. He was just helping the skinny father, is all."
"Look, he's dull, but not dumb. For all we know, he asked them for help to escape. He's one of the few around here that is still a devotee."
"And I'm telling you that he didn't!" I said, entirely too loudly. "His devotion is what makes him so reliable. A sense of duty of gold, I tell you. He won't desert us, or his dear Fatima."
Camarada spat into the fire, and I will never forget what he told me.
"God doesn't love him. God doesn't love any of us. We burned churches, killed priests, and insulted his image. God even tried to kill him once, but only took out his eye. If I were him, I wouldn't risk the chance of God coming back to finish the job. We are an army of heathens, Sebas."
And indeed, we were. But not all of us.
"But, that would make God anti-freedom," I said.
Camarada clapped like a walrus and took a sip out of his water cup. "Bingo. Now you get it. God is against freedom."
"God gave us free will to choose. That is freedom."
"No," said a voice behind us. A voice we often connected with drunken joy or furious anger. Torito was awake, but still laying down. "God only gave us the illusion of freedom. 'Choose Me or choose Death'. That's why we were cast out of the garden of Eden: we stopped being slaves when we gained wisdom and knowledge. God is a jailer."
Camarada and I were dumbstruck at the seriousness of his words. Each of them was delivered with the utmost conviction. Even his expression was of retched solemnity as if God had personally wronged him at some point in his life. But it quickly changed to his smirking aloofness and followed by some dumb joke.
"And hell will freeze over before Fatima notices that cyclops baboon," he said.
"What about Fatima?" said Lula's voice, seemingly out of nowhere.
We all jumped on our seats, and even Torito sat upright when we saw her figure approach us with black bags under her eyes.
"Lula!" I exclaimed, "what are you doing here at this hour?"
Since she worked mostly at nights, Lula, like us, slept on the afternoons. Seeing her at this time was rare.
"I need help," she said meekly.
Me, being the gentleman that I am, jumped at the opportunity to help. "Of course," I said. "Tell me, what's wrong?"
She looked at us from top to bottom before rubbing the tiredness out of her eyes. "Of course, Sebas," she said. "Come with me."
"Try to not 'Help' inside of her!" yelled Torito as Lula and I walked away from the checkpoint.
I felt my face flush with embarrassment, but Lula didn't even flinch. I don't think she ever heard him. She looked disheveled and not all quite there.
"What's wrong?" I asked a minute or so in our walk.
"Fatima," she said.
I thought she was going to somehow scold me for Torito's remarks, but she quickly dismissed my thoughts.
"She's missing."
"Wait, what?" I said. "How? When?"
Lula took a deep breath as if to stabilize herself. "Fatima said there was this weird noise near our home. Like a screeching. But close, yet far. Like if it was beckoning her, she said."
I remembered what Torito had said before. But now, it didn't make any sense. Wasn't the sound inside the bar?
"Torito also heard it," I said. "But he thought it was because he was tired. And you didn't hear it?"
"No," said Lula, "I didn't, but it was driving Fatima mad. She took her gun and went into the woods to find the sound. That was this morning, and she still hasn't come back."
"So, you need me to find her, I presume?"
"Yes," said Lula. "I can't take my mom's nagging any longer. She has been up all day, and so she keeps me up all day. And that's not the worst of it."
"Oh really?" I said. At this point, I was just happy having a conversation with her. I was sure Fatima was lazying around somewhere or barring that, just being as far away from the noise as possible. Moments alone with Lula were few and far between.
"It's driving away the customers. Some of them, at least."
"Other people hear it too, then?"
"Apparently," she said, and then remained quiet.
There wasn't really much to say after that. I tried to spark the conversation alive, but she only gave some token responses. It was obvious by her tired body that she was already pushing her limits, not unlike us.
It wasn't until we were a mile away or so from the Zurito that I began to hear it. Like a mosquito, nagging away near my ear, but far away as well. A cacophony of sounds all trying to compete against each other. At first, it was faint, like a revere in the back of my mind, but as we approached the woods, it demanded my full attention. Oddly enough, it started to become more clear, melodious, even.
"Are you sure you don't hear that?!" I asked Lula. I saw her lips moving, but no sound came out of them.
"What?!"
"I said," yelled Lula, "Fatima went this way! Are you hearing the sound?"
"Yes! It's haunting!"
"Listen," she said while speaking as close to my ears as possible, letting me feel her moist breath, "come back in an hour. If you don't, I'll call for help, okay?"
I was too lovestruck to realize her plan was stupid. Going in alone? Foolish. But I didn't want to correct her and went in. And it was easy to follow the sound. It was enveloping me, but it had a source, somewhere. I walked and walked, and as I got closer, the sound became more distinct.
It took me a few minutes to figure out that it was music. Rough guitars playing against each other, with what I would guess was a Banshee's wail. It coiled around the woods and through the trees like it tried to dance with me. And I followed.
Closer, yet closer, I could hear words in the sound.
"...primavera..."
"Pregonando...piando..."
"...real..."
There was something about it that was oddly familiar. I had heard it before, but I didn't know where. It was taunting my memory, licking my brain. I just had to follow it. But as I got closer to the source, the words became phrases, and the gibberish became crisp.
"Son sus ojos alegres, su faz risueña..."
I couldn't deny it. It was clear as day.
"Lo que se dice un tipo de madrileña..."
That was the same song I heard before. The song Tuerto had sang for us
"Neta y castiza que si entorna los ojos..."
I arrived at a clearing, and sure enough, I found Fatima.
Only, she was being dragged through the ground by her feet by a...thing.
The thing was huge, with metal tusks protruding from its face. It had no flesh on its face, only a white, bone-like mass. Dozens of white tubes had burst through its back, making all kinds of shapes and twists, like javelins. It was wearing the tattered remains of a soldier's uniform.
And it turned to me.
And I saw it.
And it saw me.
It only had one eye.
"Te cauteriza, te cauteriza..."