If We Survive

  Before I could comprehend what had happened—before my mind could even register what I’d just seen—the two guards lay lifeless on the floor and Palmer stood alone with a machine gun in his hand, the barrel leveled straight at Mendoza.

  And there was one final snapshot captured by my brain— my favorite snapshot.

  Mendoza, remember, had turned his back on Palmer. He was walking to the door. When the fight started behind him, he heard the noise and wheeled around—but it was all over so fast that by the time he was facing Palmer again, Palmer had the gun on him. So I caught this final image of the look on Mendoza’s face, pure shock, the arrogance draining out of his eyes, the color draining out of his cheeks. His hand had gone automatically to the pistol on his belt . . . but it was already too late.

  “Go on,” Palmer said quietly—smiling, grinning just like before. “Go on. Pull it, Mendoza. I want you to.”

  But Mendoza took one look at Palmer—Palmer standing between the corpses of the two gunmen on the floor—and he knew the American would empty the machine gun into him before the pistol got halfway out of that holster. His hand moved away from it. Both his hands lifted from his sides.

  I hate to remember what went through me then. Seeing Mendoza standing there at gunpoint, I felt a lightning flash of rage and hatred in me so terrible it seemed almost to take me over. I felt I had no control over myself—that the power of my rage was forcing me into motion. Because there was Mendoza—Mendoza who had threatened me when I was helpless—who had threatened Nicki and Meredith just seconds ago—threatened us all with terrible tortures. And now he was the helpless one, all his power gone. And my rage and hatred for him had taken me over and were telling me to launch myself at him, to wrap my fingers around his ugly throat and . . .

  “Easy, kid,” said Palmer. “We’re the good guys. Remember?”

  I don’t know how he knew what was going on inside me. I hadn’t moved from the spot. I hadn’t said a word. But he did know somehow. And the moment he spoke, I did remember. I remembered who I was, what I was. And it turned out the electric rage and hatred could not control me after all.

  The emotion drained out of me almost at once. My hands, which had curled into claws ready for the attack, relaxed. My arms fell to my sides.

  It was a moment that would come back to me later. It was a moment that would come back to me a lot and for a long time.

  “Put it on the floor, Mendoza,” Palmer said now. He meant the pistol. “Slowly. Thumb and finger.”

  Mendoza had regained a bit of his composure. He was relaxed again—or, that is, he was pretending to be relaxed in spite of the fury in his eyes. His hand went back to his belt. Slowly, he followed Palmer’s instructions.

  “You are surrounded by guards and barbed wire,” he said as, using only his thumb and finger, he unbuckled his holster and drew out his gun. “You really think you can escape from here?”

  “I think I can kill you in a split second if you don’t do what I tell you,” Palmer said.

  Mendoza tried to snort at that, but his eyes were full of helplessness and anger. I knew how he felt. He dropped the pistol to the floor in front of him.

  “Kick it over to the kid,” Palmer said, nodding at me.

  Sneering with disdain, Mendoza kicked the pistol to me. I started to bend down to reach for it.

  But Palmer said, “Not yet, kid. The fatigues. Put them on.”

  For a second, I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I realized: he wanted me to undress the dead guard and put on his uniform.

  “You want me to dress up as a guard?” I asked. “But my face . . . my hair . . .”

  “It’s fine,” Palmer said quickly. “It’s not like in the hills. Plenty of Santa Marians are as pale-skinned as you are— especially now after the sun has been baking you for a week. Just cover as much of your hair as you can with the bandanna. Now do it. Fast.”

  I knelt down next to the body. I thought back to how I’d had to strip the rifle off the gunman from the firing squad. I hadn’t wanted to touch a dead man then, and I didn’t want to do it now. But I guess I’d gotten a little practice in suspending the imagination since then. This time I just decided not to think about it, and I didn’t. I took the corpse’s clothes off as quickly as I could. I stripped out of mine. And a minute or two later I was wearing the khaki uniform of the revolution. Not a bad fit either. I tied the red bandanna around my forehead and pulled it up to hide my hair.

  “Now pick up the pistol,” Palmer said. “Click off the safety.”

  I didn’t know much about guns, and it took me a second to find the little switch he was talking about. But I found it.

  “Now point the gun at Mendoza and if he moves, pull that little trigger gizmo on the bottom,” Palmer said.

  I pointed the pistol at Mendoza, my finger on the trigger. Palmer leaned his rifle against the wall. He stooped down and started pulling the fatigues off the other dead guard.

  Mendoza turned from him to me. He looked down at the pistol I had aimed at him. He smiled a condescending smile.

  “You really think you have the courage to do it?” he asked.

  I heard myself laugh—it was a crazy sound. But if he only knew how close I’d come to killing him with my bare hands, he wouldn’t have asked the question.

  I guess he got his answer in my laughter, because his condescending smile disappeared. He turned away from me. He turned to Jim instead.

  Jim was standing against the opposite wall. He looked as if he couldn’t comprehend what was happening. His lanky body had gone completely stiff. His face had gone completely blank. His bug-eyes were staring straight ahead—staring at nothing, as far as I could tell, just staring into space.

  “And you,” Mendoza said to him. “You who know better than these others.”

  Jim blinked. He shifted his stare from nothing to the rebel. “What?” he said in a distant voice.

  “You are not a fool like they are. Not just some spoiled American. You understand the difficulties facing my country, my people.”

  “Yes . . . ,” said Jim, still as if he were very far away.

  “Do you still wish to speak to the new president?” Mendoza asked him.

  “I . . . ,” said Jim.

  “Because this can be arranged, you know. It is not too late. Fernandez Cobar is a great man, a great spirit, but he is always ready to listen to even the humblest petitioner.”

  I heard Palmer chuckle at that as he stripped down, getting ready to change into the guard’s fatigues. “What a guy!” he muttered.

  I went on pointing the pistol at Mendoza, barely listening to what he said, just watching for any sudden movements— half hoping, if you want the truth, that he would give me an excuse to pull the trigger.

  Jim just went on staring at him. His mouth opened and closed. And then he said, “Who are you? Who are you people?”

  Mendoza straightened a little as if with pride. “We are soldiers of justice,” he said. “You say you are familiar with President Cobar’s work. You should know this. We are soldiers of justice.”

  Jim slowly shook his head, like a man coming out of a dream. “You were going to torture us. You were going to torture the girls. You said you were acting on direct orders of the president.”

  Mendoza answered with a little shrug. “Do you think justice is easy? Do you think you can make things fair without using force? People are not equal by nature—you must compel them to be equal. President Cobar understands that if you want to build a better world, you must destroy all of those who stand in your way.”

  “But . . . But . . . But . . . ,” said Jim, slowly coming back to himself. “That’s not a better world. That’s this world. That’s the world we have already.”

  Palmer chuckled again. “You can probably get some cash for those old Cobar books on e-Bay, Professor,” he said with a grin. “You can throw in your Che Guevara T-shirts while you’re at it.”

  He was just buttoning up the khaki shirt. It was
too small for him—it looked like it would rip open if he moved too fast—but I guessed if nobody looked too closely, he would pass for a rebel, same as me.

  When he’d finished tying the red bandanna around his forehead, he put his hand out to me. I gave him the pistol. He held it on Mendoza while, with his free hand, he took the machine gun off the wall and tossed it my way. I caught it. Then, while I trained the rifle on Mendoza, Palmer shucked the magazine out of the pistol and popped out the shell in the chamber. He handed the empty gun back to Mendoza.

  “Holster it,” he said.

  Mendoza hesitated, glancing at me, at my gun. He didn’t like taking orders. But he didn’t have much choice. He slid the empty pistol back into its holster.

  Palmer took a deep breath. He looked at Jim. He looked at me.

  “All right, boys,” he drawled in that ironic way of his. “I think we better go rescue Lady Liberty before she hurts someone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Palmer’s plan was so simple it was kind of brilliant. Mendoza had come into the dungeon cell with two guards. He had been going to bring one of us out—one prisoner—for interrogation. And in fact, he walked out with two guards and a prisoner, exactly as he was supposed to. Except the guards were Palmer and I, and the prisoner was Jim. And if Mendoza made one wrong move, we’d shoot him. So it was a little different.

  Before we left the cell, Palmer told Mendoza exactly what to do and say, speaking in rapid Spanish. I couldn’t understand the words, but I could guess the gist of it. He wanted Mendoza basically to play the part of himself, as if everything were going according to plan. Mendoza listened silently to Palmer’s instructions and gave a single, stiff nod. He was going to obey for fear of getting shot—but you only had to look in his eyes to know that he would be waiting and watching, every second, for a chance to break free.

  Well, I thought, let him try.

  When he was done talking, Palmer nodded toward the cell door. Mendoza took a breath—to get control over his anger, I thought. Then he pounded on the door with his fist and shouted, “Abran!” Which I guessed meant open up.

  There was a second’s pause. During that second, I felt the nervousness coursing through me—a flood of adrenaline. If I had thought about it, I would’ve realized that Mendoza was probably right. We were surrounded by guards with guns, not to mention walls topped with barbed wire. We didn’t really have much of a chance of getting away with this. But somehow, although I was tense—really tense—I wasn’t as frightened as you might think I would be—or as I might think I would be. I guess I felt, like, at least we weren’t just sitting there helplessly waiting to be tortured or killed. At least, if we went down, we would go down fighting. That was something. Actually, that was a lot.

  My breath caught as I heard the bolt on the dungeon door slide open. A guard in the corridor outside started to open the door—and I suddenly thought: He’ll see the bodies of the two guards! But before he could, Mendoza, as instructed by Palmer, barked an order at him. The guard moved away from the cell entrance and Mendoza stepped out into the corridor. Palmer and I quickly followed, pushing Jim ahead of us at gunpoint. And Jim marched out, looking just like a prisoner on his way to the torture cell. He looked depressed and defeated and afraid, I mean—and I’m not sure he was pretending.

  The second we were in the corridor, Palmer shut the cell door behind us and threw the bolt. There were two more guards out here and Mendoza was giving them orders. One used his key to double lock the door. The others went running off, I don’t know where, to whatever chore Mendoza had told them to do.

  We moved quickly. My impressions of what was happening were fleeting and confused. I was so wired, so tense. My eyes were moving rapidly every which way, looking to see if anyone recognized us or realized what we were doing. Everything went by in a kind of hectic daze.

  Mendoza took the lead, but Palmer was right at his shoulder. Palmer kept up a steady murmuring in the rebel’s ear, telling him what to do, telling him what would happen to him if he didn’t do it. Mendoza’s expression remained frozen as we left the corridor of cells and entered another hall and pushed through another door into another corridor. Twice, armed guards appeared in front of us, making my hand tighten on my gun. But both times Mendoza barked orders at them and they scattered—and we marched quickly on.

  Now, we were in another dark hall of cells. Naked lightbulbs burned above us and we moved through the pools of light beneath them into areas of darkness. I caught my breath as yet another armed guard approached us out of the shadows—I never saw him coming out of the dark before he was right there in front of us. Yet again, Mendoza gave him orders. But this time, the guard turned on his heel, a 180, and started marching ahead of us down the hall.

  We stopped before another metal door. More orders from Mendoza as Palmer stood by watchfully. The guard unlocked the door. Threw the bolt. Stood back as the door opened.

  We walked into a cell, another dungeon cell, no different than ours had been.

  A huge jolt of excitement went through me as I saw Nicki and Meredith there.

  The girls were huddled together against the far wall, sunk in shadow. Nicki seemed to be resting on Meredith’s shoulder. Meredith had her head tilted back, resting against the rough stone.

  The girls leapt to their feet as Mendoza came in. Meredith’s face was already setting in a mask of defiance, her eyes blazing, her lips set. She looked as if she was getting ready to give Mendoza any kind of hard time she could think of.

  And then her eyes flicked to the gunman at Mendoza’s shoulder: Palmer. I saw her lips part in surprise. She glanced quickly at me. She understood. She seemed to go very still, her expression wary.

  “What are you going to . . . ?” Nicki started to say.

  But then she got it too. She gave a little gasp and then, very quickly, fell silent. She edged forward, out of the shadow, into the glaring light of the single bare bulb above us. That’s when I got my first good look at her face. And I felt the anger boiling up inside me.

  There was a massive red bruise on one of Nicki’s cheeks. It was already beginning to swell and turn dark purple. Her eye was almost shut. Someone had hit her, really belted her. I wondered if it was the guard who had unlocked the door for us. I wondered how he would look with a bullet hole in the center of his forehead . . .

  We’re the good guys, remember, I told myself. Yeah, yeah, I remembered. But these guys who beat up women—they seriously tick me off.

  “You are to come with us,” said Mendoza gruffly. I could tell the words were just about sticking in his throat, but he said them—he had no choice. He stood aside and gestured to the door. “This way.”

  Meredith, back straight and chin lifted as always, walked majestically out the dungeon door. Nicki followed, passing close to me as she went. And as she did, she looked into my eyes. I expected to see terror there and pain, but instead there was something new—new for her, I mean. She looked . . . steady. More than that. Despite the ugly bruise marring her pretty features, her eyes were sort of sparkling. I almost thought she started to smile at me . . .

  Then she went past, following Meredith out the door. Jim followed them. Then Mendoza, with Palmer and me right behind.

  Now it began again: the swift march down the hall, out the door, down the next hall to the stairwell. Mendoza and Palmer went ahead with Nicki and Meredith and Jim right behind, and me in the rear as if I were guarding against the prisoners’ escape. As before, I was looking every which way. As before, I was waiting every moment for someone to point at us and shout, “Wait! Stop them!” And so, as before, the trip to the stairwell went by in those quick, frightened flashes with my pounding heart keeping rhythm as we moved.

  We reached the stairs. Marched up. Stepped out of the well into the main hallway. We pushed through a gate. Down another hall. Through another gate. It was the same path we had taken coming in. The front door—the exit into the prison courtyard—had to be getting close.

  Again,
as we walked quickly forward, I caught glimpses of men lying unconscious on the floor—of a pool of smeared blood where a body had recently been—of a woman, the same woman who had been begging for help when we came in, now sitting in despair against a wall with one child under each arm, her head tilting forward as she tried to fight off sleep.

  This poor country, I thought. This poor, sad country.

  Then I raised my eyes and looked ahead and every thought left me except for one: escape.

  Because I saw the prison door. The checkpoint where we had first entered. The way out.

  It was just a long table with a cluster of guards standing around it. There was a metal detector, but no one seemed to be walking through it. In fact, the guards didn’t seem to be doing very much besides chatting with one another and smoking cigarettes. I guess since the rebels had only recently taken over the place, things were still a little disorganized. So the guards milled around, not knowing what to do—and just beyond them, just a few steps beyond, were the doors, the front doors out into the courtyard.

  Escape.

  There was a long way to go, I knew. Even once we were outside, we would somehow have to get a truck, get through the walls, get past the guard towers. I didn’t know how we were going to manage it. I couldn’t think about it yet. All I could think about was getting past that checkpoint, getting out those doors.

  But something was wrong.

  I saw Mendoza start to slow down ahead of us. I saw Palmer leaning in toward him, whispering something in his ear. Mendoza started to glance at him, as if in surprise. But Palmer whispered again, harshly this time, and Mendoza faced forward. He started moving again.

  My mouth had gone dry. My pulse was beating so fast it was almost painful. We were so close. What was happening? What was wrong? I was weak with suspense as, step by swift step, we approached the guards standing around the checkpoint.