On My Way to Paradise (12 page)

Red and white clouds swirled and resolved into a
shape. Whorehouse Rat was smoking his cigar, breathing smoke into
my face. He was the one who was out of place here! He had come to
kill me! I knew it as surely as I knew my own name. I screamed and
tried to swing, but my arms were pinned behind my back.

"Overdose. . . Overdose. . . Overdose. Cocktails," he
said, moving his cigar with his tongue so the glowing end tipped
down at an angle. It left a fiery afterimage in the air.
Fascinating.

"But he only took one," someone said.

Yes, I thought, but what dosage? I screamed in rage
at the Whorehouse Rat.

He slapped my face. "What day is it?"

I tried to answer, but couldn’t remember. It seemed
very important. The act of trying to think made my head ache. I
began to laugh. In the snap of a finger, everything became very
lucid again. And the lucidity was funny. I kept laughing.

"You’ve had an overdose of cocktails," Whorehouse Rat
yelled. "Calm down!"

I looked at his face. He had two, thin, silver tears
tattooed beneath his eyes. I had seen such marks before, in the
ghettoes of Colón and Panamá City. Gang leaders wore them to
advertise how many rivals they’d executed: one tear for each
killing. They were very funny tattoos. I began laughing and weeping
at the joke implicit in the tattoos.

Outside the customs office, a gringo shouted "Angelo
Osic, come out with your hands on your head!" I couldn’t stop
laughing.

"We’re trying to help you!" Rat Face explained.
"See!" Someone twisted my head around so I could see everyone in
the room. Some people sprawled on the floor, aiming long-barreled
plasma rifles at the door. Others were suited in body armor painted
in jungle shades of nonreflective green and dull red, waiting to
fight anyone who came in. Perfecto wore only armored gloves. The
man who’d played the guitar wore laser-targeting goggles and aimed
a rocket launcher with four minirockets at the door.

The man with gray slacks stood weaponless and
armorless against the wall, frowning, obviously upset by the turn
of events, nervously watching me. He was very funny, and I laughed
harder. All the duffle bags were dumped on the floor. Clothes,
ammunition, and grenades spilled from every bag. "See!" Rat said.
"We will help you. Perfecto says you are lucky, and you fight like
a jaguar—a stupid, weak jaguar, but full of fury at least. Besides,
you have avenged General Tapia today when you killed Arish. You
have heard of Tapia?"

I tried to remember. My head ached. "Chile," I said,
but the single word sounded so funny I just smiled and could
remember nothing more.

"Yes, that’s right," Rat Face said. "He was murdered
in Chile by that cabrón you killed today! We had Arish on trial,
but someone poisoned his guards and he escaped. Remember?"

I didn’t remember. "Cabrón," goat fucker, that was a
funny word. I said it over and over. "Cabrón, cabrón, cabrón."

Whorehouse Rat continued, "We will tie you up now,
because we cannot trust you while the drugs are still working in
your blood. Okay?"

"Wait!" I said, remembering the man in gray slacks.
Someone stuck a gag in my mouth and tied my hands behind my back.
Because my ankle was broken, I couldn’t get up. My muscles strained
at the cords, but it was no use, and I watched the man in gray
slacks and laughed.

The man who’d tied my hands whispered, "You’ll be
fine. I’ll take good care of you." He stood behind me, so I
couldn’t see his face, but he tapped my arm with the barrel of a
fifty-caliber Rivas bush rifle to show me he was armed.

Out in the corridor, the gringo yelled over a
loudspeaker, "Angelo Osic, come out with your hands on your
head."

 Of course, I was tied up and couldn’t come out.
This seemed like a very poignant observation, and I would have
notified the man who held the loudspeaker about my predicament, but
I couldn’t because I was gagged. I just laughed at the irony of my
situation.

Everyone in the room waited anxiously for something
to happen, but no one broke through the door. Some people began to
stretch, and one young man yawned as if bored. Some others saw him,
and they began yawning too, as if to see who could feign the most
boredom. Finally, in an effort to lure the security team into the
ambush, a woman with a plasma rifle yelled "Help! Help! He’s got a
gun. He says he’ll kill us all!"

Several people in the room snickered. And I agreed
that her ploy was among the funniest things I’d ever heard. I began
crying and laughing and became afraid I would choke to death on my
gag because I couldn’t breathe and laugh at the same time.

One young man from the yawning team smiled and shot a
flechette into the ceiling. "Get back in line, you," he yelled, and
several men screamed as if in terror or pain while one of the
youths made animal noises like pigs and monkeys. Little pieces of
plastic fell from the ceiling as if it were wounded. This caused
terrible spasms of laughter in me, and I began choking; every time
I caught my breath a little I would laugh again. Some men looked at
me and pointed and chuckled, and they were still trying to stifle
their laughter when the station’s security guards ran into the room
to rescue the "hostages."

There were six security guards wearing pretty
space-blue armor and carrying stunners, and they didn’t have a
chance.

When the first man came through the door, Perfecto
slugged him in the chest so hard that the guard’s armor split,
sending shards of enamel to skitter across the floor. The sound of
Perfecto’s fist crashing into the armor startled me, and I realized
it wasn’t funny. The second man in line shot Perfecto with a
stunner, and Perfecto went down, but four mercenaries immediately
jumped the guard. He was huge, and he slugged two of them and sent
them flying, and one of them hit the wall and vanished, and I
screamed as I realized it was a hallucination even though it looked
so real.

The boys from the yawning team showed terror on their
faces. Every time the big guard hit someone, two more people jumped
him. A young man popped the snaps on the guard’s helmet and pulled
it off, so the chimeras could slug the man in the face. Someone
slammed the door behind the security guards, blocking their escape.
There were two armored mercenaries to every guard, and the
mercenaries just held the guards and beat the hell out of them,
stripped off their armor, dragged them to a wall, and stuffed them
under the chairs, where they moaned, naked.

There were several moments of silence, and the
mercenaries used the lull to get six more men in armor. The man
with the gray slacks had moved closer. He was inching toward me. I
began laughing again, but this time out of nervousness, and my arms
seemed to strain of their own volition at the cords that held me.
Perfecto clawed the air as he struggled to regain consciousness,
and someone pulled him away from the door. A chimera went and stood
in front of the door and stared as if he were trying to see through
it. His ears swung out from the side and pricked up, like the ears
of a dog. This frightened me because I had never seen such a thing
and I thought it was a hallucination, but as I watched, his ears
remained rigid and I knew it was real.

"Someone’s coming!" the chimera said, smiling. "I
hear a remote! Or maybe a robot!"

The guitarist with the rocket launcher ran up to the
door, and everyone held their breath. The man with the gray slacks
was moving closer to me, was only an arms’ length away, and I saw
that he held a knife in his palm. I tried to nudge my guard to get
his attention, and I was not aware of any sound, but suddenly all
the chimeras in the room yelled "Now!" as the man with the rockets
kicked open the door and fired.

An armored remote the size of a small tank hunched
behind the door. One missile hit the power plant to the remote’s
chemical lasers. A tongue of fire lashed into our room and I felt I
knew what it would be like to stare down the throat of a dragon.
People screamed. The concussion peeled back the metal walls of the
customs office, denting it out of shape, and flung me against the
wall. The man with the missile launcher flew through the air and
hit the wall above me, then slid down on top of me. Shrapnel and
pieces of remote shot into the walls, and dark smoke billowed from
the remote’s metal innards. A distant fire alarm shrilled. Tons of
debris drifted down from a hole that opened in the ceiling.

One man staggered across the room, holding his eyes,
choking in the smoke. Another woman writhed on the floor and
screamed, a piece of metal the size of a crowbar lodged in her arm.
Others were bleeding from various wounds. Blood had splattered my
shirt, and I thought I’d taken a hit. I tried to scream, and looked
around for help, and saw the man in gray slacks lying crumpled
beside me. A pipe as thick as my arm was lodged in his hip, and a
large piece of metal had caved-in the right side of his face. The
blood was from him. His hands still twitched. And I realized I
still didn’t know who his accomplice was.

Through the smoke I could see that a crowd of station
workers had gathered a hundred meters down the corridor to watch
the fight. The concussion had thrown them to the floor. Some of
them lay screaming. Blood was smeared on the corridor walls.

All the mercenaries who wore armor untangled
themselves from the floor and began cheering as they charged down
the corridor and shot into the ceiling. They ran to the fallen and
wounded station technicians and began rounding up hostages. I
looked at the others in the room: Three armorless mercenaries were
wounded but conscious, including the man with the silver face; two
others were dead. Perfecto had been sheltered from the blast, and
he sat against the dented wall, rubbing his head. Several naked
guards had shrapnel wounds; two guards were dead.

Perfecto looked around the room for a moment, then
said, "I need a drink," and picked his way among the bodies and
wreckage and headed down the corridor.

My head ached and my mind felt numb. But I noticed
something strange: As the mercenaries moved among their hostages,
they moved with vigor. They seemed a great contrast to the haggard
men I’d seen earlier. Their steps seemed almost choreographed, a
dance of joy.

Within a few minutes Perfecto returned with a keg of
Aguila beer. He sat beside me, gave me a drink, and talked. I was
too stunned to answer his questions, so he carried on a rambling
monologue, telling me how it was obvious I was a man with great
luck. "Just look at all the friends you’ve found in your hour of
need! Think of all the good things we’ll be able to loot from the
station. Is there anything you want? Drugs? Liquor? Anything
at all?"

Soon others began filing in with food and rum. They
sprayed bandages on the wounded and filled their bellies with food.
A couple mercenaries forced rum down the throats of captured
guards, and several mercenaries gathered around the big guard who’d
caused so much trouble. They praised him for his strength and
courage and told him he should leave the punks in the security team
and come fight on Baker, and when he was drunk enough he agreed it
was a good idea. Everyone sang and ate and drank, and I became very
tired and all my muscles ached and my head ached, so I stretched my
muscles until they relaxed. The singing and the wails of people and
sirens and the sputtering of small fires became a distant rushing
in my ears that lulled me to sleep.

I woke in a small gray room, tied to a chair. A
dignified man with silver hair was leaning over me. Whorehouse Rat
sat on the floor behind him, the light catching the gleam of
tattooed tears. The man with the silver hair asked how I’d managed
to kill Arish.

I looked into his gray eyes and my whole soul desired
to answer him, but I couldn’t think straight, could hardly remember
my own name. I wanted to go back to sleep, but the man said I
couldn’t sleep until I told him everything, and this seemed
eminently reasonable.

So, as best I could, I related how Arish had
strangled Flaco and tried to kill me, and how I’d shot Arish and
used his eye to trick the shuttle into bringing me to the space
station. I could only remember the story in parts, brief unrelated
flashes. I told him about Tamara and Jafari and the AI’s. He made
me repeat several parts of the story over and over, and each time
his request seemed very reasonable and I wished to answer
perfectly. When I fell asleep, he’d jab my ribs to waken me. He
grilled me about Jafari and asked me to name the AI’s. But I didn’t
know the names of the AI’s who’d aided the socialists. He seemed
very curious about Tamara, and began asking about her dreams, and
when I told him how I’d wakened from the final dream unable to
think, he became excited and his eyes gleamed. "Did you hear that!
Did you hear that! I told you someone with her talent existed!" he
said. I wanted to ask what he meant by "her talent," but I could
not think straight. He looked at Whorehouse Rat and said
threateningly, "Keep this quiet! Whatever you hear, keep it
quiet!"

Whorehouse Rat nodded and smiled at me and said, "Of
course, General."

The general said, "Tell me about the dream again, the
darkness washing over you. What did it feel like? What do you
remember after that?"

I repeated Tamara’s last dream over and over again as
I begged him to let me sleep. My head hurt from trying to remember.
The darkness coming out of her mouth, the cold numbness, and myself
crying at a sense of loss was all I could recall. I could remember
nothing concrete after the darkness hit me, but the general kept
trying to draw out something more.

He yelled, "Her job in Intelligence. Did she say what
it was? Did she give you any hint?"

"No."

 "Think harder!" he said, grabbing my hand. "Any
hint at all? This is crucial!"