GPS (46 page)

Somehow he still knew the back door to the house was just over his left shoulder. Before he could turn and stumble over to the door, a bullet plunged into his left thigh. Another pierced the flesh of his shoulder. A third and a fourth went zinging past his head. Then a fifth one, shot from Jeff’s sniper rifle after he and his hemorrhaging companion had gotten within 50 yards of Josh’s car and saw the man come staggering out, struck a fatal blow to his temple.

At the time, Jeff had no idea who he had shot, just that his personal death toll had grown at a rapid rate since his arrival.

The beautiful shining car Josh had bought with his signing bonus from the Padres was still running. Like Jeff after him, Josh had gone through a period of disbelief about the travel between worlds and the war and what it all meant. And like Jeff, when he decided he was in, Josh went through an extensive set of preparations at home before coming back to fight, and he had continually tweaked it, trying to perfect his own comfort and safety in the desert.

Part of that effort was sinking thousands of dollars into customizing the Lexus in every way imaginable. It had bulletproof glass and paneling, and the entire frame was reinforced for high-impact driving and collisions. Even the magnificent silver paint job, the thing which had gotten Josh found, contained a special anti-sun, flame-retardant agent to help protect it while he was on revolucion business.

“Get in, Delaney! I’ll take you up. If your car’s not there, we’ll drive until we run out of gas, and when we run out of gas, I’ve got 10 more gallons in the trunk.”

“No way, Josh. You gotta get out while you can. My car is my problem —”

“Fuck that! Get in and let’s go!”

Jeff jumped into the passenger seat still holding his rifle, and although the GPS was already on, it was clear Josh didn’t need it to find his way out of Destinoso. He threw the car into drive and, after a jolt, he got it in gear and slammed the gas pedal. “God! I can’t believe it!” he shouted, steering the car out of the view of the ranch toward the old road, ignoring the blasts and gunshots behind him. “My last night, and I get careless. And look at me!”

The machete must have either missed Josh’s jugular vein or barely grazed it because he was still alive, still alert. If he didn’t get emergency care soon, though, it wouldn’t matter because he would bleed every drop of life out of his body. “I’m gonna be on the DL in the middle of the summer,” he went on. “I’m gonna be screwed. I’ve got a game at 7 tomorrow night!”

“Josh, if you don’t get to the other side and magically land in the parking lot of an emergency room, you might have taken your last at-bat,” Jeff said as the Lexus veered off the road and pulled down a steep path leading into the Rio Vera Canyon and, he hoped, up to his car. The glowing sky over Destinoso sent bands of light through the series of mountain peaks and evergreen treetops above, and the sounds of the scene were still audible.

“Don’t wait on me, Josh. I’m serious, man, you’re gonna die out here,” Jeff said, his hand on the door handle. “Just let me go up on foot. I mean, if my car’s gone, I’m sunk anyway.”

“Not happening,” Josh said calmly, using his left hand to steer the car across the canyon — which was surprisingly calm and quiet, with all of the revolucion trucks still parked in a neat row — and his right to flip and reapply the blood-drenched tourniquet on his neck.

“Jesus, man,” Jeff said, stripping off his sweat-soaked shirt and forcing it into Josh’s hand.

The car zipped across the back end of the canyon and slowly began crawling up the spiraling path. On the rock face down to their right were the reflections of fire, flashes of flame that would be burned into both of their brains forever. About half way up, Jeff realized Josh was breathing in gasps now, leaning his head against the window, and on the most treacherous road conceivable.

“Are you gonna make it or what?” Jeff asked.

“Listen, Delaney. I have no way of knowing if I’m going to make it so don’t ask me,” Simmons moaned as the car wound up into the clearing where the FB had picked up Josh’s trail. “Get up through that brush and pray to God they didn’t find your car too.

“Then we both make it back down the hill real nice like, and we get the hell out.”

As he jumped out and began jogging in the direction of his parking place, Jeff was certain the Celica would be gone or completely trashed. No way they’d found Josh’s car out here and not his. He just knew it. He was so nervous, he began talking quietly to himself, trying to convince himself he’d survive. Paulo had pulled off a masterpiece of an attack and he had little to fear if he could just crawl inside his car and get out of here. Then, he’d really have a decision to make.

“If it’s here, I’m never coming back. I’m going back home and I’m going to set things right with Sandy, the Mets, whoever. I love baseball, and if the car is here, then I’ll definitely, almost definitely, probably, never ever want to come back to this crazy place. Please be here. Please.”

It was there.

For a second, Jeff’s heart sank because he was so scared he wouldn’t see it that he thought at first he
didn’t
in the dark thicket overlooking the edge of the river bed, but it was there.

He almost cried at the sight of it. He hurried around the side of the car, still terrified the FB might have found it and simply not wanted it. Maybe the doors would be locked or the keys gone, or the GPS, or maybe it was rigged with a bomb. He got in, hands shaking, thinking how odd it felt to be leaving a battlefield in the same car he’d tried to get lucky with Riley in, the car he’d driven since his mid 20s. Before even trying the ignition — his next terrifying hurdle — Jeff pulled the key out and scrambled around to his trunk, the smell of smoke heavy even under the cool rock shelf.

He popped the trunk and, making sure the safety was on, he slid the Springfield rifle into the compartment and lightly shut the trunk lid. With his keys in his left hand, Jeff pulled the Blackhawk out of his waistband with his right. He planned to keep it on his lap until he was sure he was safe. In the few steps he took from the rear of the car back to the driver’s seat, Jeff could not shake the fear of what he thought would happen next, when he slid the key back into the ignition and turned it, and he was right.

The car didn’t start.

Then, after a panicked flurry of attempted restarts, the engine kicked to life, but the headlights and the dashboard lights blinked off after Jeff switched them on, and the car sputtered. Then they flickered and came back on again.
“Warren GPS Technology. Welcome.”
The GPS, like always, kicked on without being prompted and, like always, it scared the shit out of Jeff.

“If I get out of here, I’m never coming back,” he said aloud again, more confidently, pulling the car slowly out of its hiding place in the rocks. “It was eye-opening, and Paulo was great, taught me a whole new way of looking at things. But this shit is too crazy for me.”

For the first time, Jeff noticed interference on the GPS each time the car’s electricity flickered. The battery must have been dead and the GPS was running solely on the car’s power. Josh looked to be nodding off when Jeff pulled into the clearing and his fading headlights found the silver Lexus, which had black burn marks on its rear end. He stirred and sat up when he saw the lights. Blood was now all over his shoulder and the driver’s seat, but he coolly lowered his window as Jeff pulled up beside him.

Josh didn’t answer. He slid the window closed and led the way back down, and it was a good thing. Every time Jeff’s car hit a bump on the winding road down into the parking lot canyon, the headlights and dash lights and GPS all dimmed in unison. There were moments when Jeff relied solely on Josh’s headlights and taillights to keep from driving off the edge. When they reached the bottom, Josh took off, kicking up gravel into the windshield of the Celica. Since he was forced to slow down, Jeff reached for the GPS, pressed MENU, selected My Trips and highlighted Vacation Home without selecting it.

He hit the gas again, jerked the car ahead, and the lights and the GPS all dimmed again. He steered the car through the canyon fast enough to catch up to Josh’s dust trail and then, as he was picking up speed out onto the mountain road, he reached up and hit SELECT, now seeing the taillights of Josh’s car just ahead.

“
Calculating … Arriving at destination in, point, three, miles.”

Jeff pushed on the gas, the headlights and the GPS now blinking in and out and the light from Destinoso Canyon filling the sky behind him. He pushed the car as fast as it would go, hoping to catch a glimpse of Josh ahead of him. As he wound around a left-hand curve —
“Arriving at destination in, point, two, miles”
— he caught sight of Simmons’ car and pressed harder on the pedal as the road straightened back out.

“
Arriving at destination in, five, hundred, feet.”

Jeff saw the rear lights of Simmons’ car disintegrate. He also saw what looked to be dozens of sets of headlights approaching on the horizon, so many it would have been impossible to count them. He didn’t notice that in his rearview mirror there were just as many headlights materializing out of the softening gloom of the burning canyon.

“
Arriving at destination.”

As the GPS spoke, the car hit a large pothole made when the road was being cleared by the revolucion army, a pothole Jeff would have seen and likely missed if he had been watching the road.
The electric connection in the Celica blinked out completely when it hit the bump, and the jolt forced Jeff to take his right hand off the wheel to secure the bouncing gun in his lap. While he was somewhere in the blank limbo between this world and the one he hoped to see at least one more time, a scrolling My Trips menu popped up on the GPS. The car began to disappear and the GPS randomly selected a location and catapulted the car in that general direction.

The Celica, and the Warren GPS which had been bought at a discount electronics store on Canal Street in New Orleans, made it back into the world in which they were born.

Jeff did not.

The hum and vibration caused by hundreds of approaching vehicles brought him back to consciousness on the side of the road. Shirtless, dazed and bleeding from numerous gashes on his arms, legs and back, he dragged himself to a sitting position, then stood and began fumbling on the ground for his gun. As the headlights coming from both directions began to illuminate the straightaway in the desert road, Jeff staggered away from them and collapsed behind a tangle of desert brush.

- Epilogue -

Josh Simmons was the Texas League Player of the Year in 2009 and was also The Sporting News Comeback Athlete of the Year after his harrowing recovery from what he described as “a bizarre hunting accident” that had left him stranded in the Texas desert, alone and bleeding, before he dragged himself to his car and made it to a suburban Dallas hospital just in time for emergency neck surgery.

He missed the remainder of the 2008 season, but the notoriety his story gave the San Diego Padres — especially since he was their top prospect — made them hang on to Simmons. After a well-publicized rehab, he was back and raring to go by spring training the following year. He struggled to relocate his swing at first, but his zest for the game had doubled.

Some time in early June, Simmons found his stroke again, and he didn’t stop hitting after that. After being held in Midland for the 2009 campaign, he made brief stops in Double-A and Triple-A in 2010, and became a key ingredient in a blockbuster trade that sent him to Philadelphia before the end of the season. He was the Phillies’ starting center fielder for the 2011 season.

Josh missed the action of the revolucion more than he dreamed possible. It was a rush that could not be duplicated or replaced. He went through what he called his “other rehab,” and to some extent thought he had learned to appreciate the feeling of emptiness other men his age felt after returning from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Josh and his wife made an agreement after his release from the hospital that their children would never know his secret life existed. The baseball heroics would have to suffice in terms of their opinion of him, even though he had done so much more. The same summer he debuted with the Phillies, Josh had a son, his third and final child. After some serious discussion on the subject, the couple agreed to name the child Douglass Fonseca Simmons. Douglass was for Frederick Douglass.

The thrill of major league baseball could not compare with the feeling of belonging, accomplishment and, ultimately, abandonment Josh associated with his tour in the revolucion. He spent many late nights sitting alone at the bar in the basement of his Cherry Hill, N.J., in-season home, staring at the frighteningly beautiful and complicated map of his revolucion campaign, which he’d had framed and which called to him constantly.

He could still name most every road, mountain and dry river bed in the entire nation, and always figured when his playing days were finished, he had some great second career possibilities with what he knew about the desert.

To his own surprise, Simmons longed for Jeff to show up suddenly in his life again, to go with him to that baseball game and to find out everything that had happened on the other side after he left that final time.

--

Riley Peletier didn’t attend a Pulitzer Prize banquet, but instead two. The second time, in 2011, she was winning a Pulitzer for her New York Times series titled, “Hell on Earth: My Darfur Days.”

For the remainder of her life, she lived as a critically-acclaimed author and activist. Her dream was one of those lifelong sorts of dreams like Felix Ascondo’s that really took her whole life to fulfill. After Africa, Riley spent two more years living in New Orleans before accepting a job as a BBC correspondent and online columnist in Rome, where she lived the rest of her life.