Danny Garza froze. “You shouldn’t talk that way, Carmen,” he said without turning around. “You don’t wanna give comfort to the enemy. That fuckin’ deserter tried to poison your mind.” He left, taking his bully-boys with him.
So that was that.
She passed a dread-filled week, fearful of hearing news of Martin’s capture. There was none. Instead, there was something even more terrifying and unprecedented.
There was a missile attack on the base.
It happened in broad daylight; it happened under a clear blue sky. It happened during the lunch rush, while Carmen was doing her best to sling hash and make nice with the soldiers, ignoring the ache in her heart and the morning sickness that persisted until late in the day.
It started with a hollow thumping sound and dishes rattling. And then sirens, a loud, blaring Klaxon. Everyone stared wide-eyed.
“We’re under attack!” A man with a sergeant’s stripes and a fondness for tripe soup stuck his fingers in his mouth and whistled shrilly. “Back to base, men! Civvies take cover!”
“Take cover where?” Carmen asked in bewilderment.
Soldiers streamed around her, grabbing hats and guns, boiling into the streets. Armored trucks roared to life. The siren yammered incessantly.
“The walk-in!” Grady shouted above the clamor. He stabbed one meaty finger at the ceiling. “Get your boy! I’ll get Sonia!”
They did.
They huddled in the walk-in cooler, surrounded by darkness and hamburger and chorizo, while missiles pounded the base. Tommy clung to her, burying his face in her neck. Carmen did her best to soothe him.
“It’s okay, mijo,” she whispered. “It’s okay.”
He whimpered. “I wish Martin was here!”
She kissed him. “Me, too.”
“Martin.” Grady’s voice was disembodied in the darkness. “He was an odd one, eh? Had that way of looking at you without blinking.” He was quiet a moment. “What was it Danny Garza was saying? That he was some kind of traitor? Maybe in league with El Segundo?”
“No,” Carmen said automatically.
“Hush, Grady,” Sonia murmured.
In the chilly darkness, Grady’s shoulders rose and fell. “It’s pretty weird. This Martin fellow vanishes and a week later we’re hit. Pretty goddamned weird, that’s all I’m saying.”
Carmen tightened her arms around Tommy. “So stop saying it, please.”
After a while, there were no more distant thumps and tremors. The Klaxons went silent. They emerged from the walk-in, ventured into the streets along with hundreds of others, surveying the damage. One missile had landed in town.
“Oh, shit,” Carmen said, gazing at the rubble of the building where she had once shared an apartment with her cousin Inez—where Inez yet lived. Or had lived. Her eyes burned. “Oh, shit!”
There were mounted arc lights and bullhorns. “Step away, people,” said an amplified voice. “This is a war zone. For your own safety, a curfew is in effect. Go home and stay home!”
“Mommy?” Tommy looked up at her, clutching her hand. “Did Martin do this?”
“No, honey.” She had to believe it. “No.”
Onlookers began digging through the rubble, ignoring the soldiers. They found a piece of sleeve, a limp hand, and frantically shifted chunks of concrete.
“A disaster team is on the way! Go home and stay home!”
No one heeded the soldiers. They formed a brigade. Two bodies were uncovered: Mark Zaltan and his grandmother Esmerelda, the oldest woman in Outpost. The old woman was still in her wheelchair, Mark draped protectively over her. Carmen watched in horror, clutching Tommy.
“He’s got a pulse!” someone shouted.
“What about her?”
“No!”
“Ah, God!” Carmen whispered. “Inez.”
There was a shot fired in the air. “You are ordered to disperse! Go home!”
“He needs a goddamn doctor!”
“Keep working; there are others!”
And then Father Ramon was there, his cassock swirling, confronting the soldier in charge. His eyes blazed like the wrath of God. He was magnificent, shouting down the soldiers. They stopped ordering people home and began working side by side with them. More help came from the base with earth-moving equipment and a medical team. Carmen took Tommy to stay with Sonia and went back to help, clearing rubble until her back ached and her hands were raw. If the effort brought on a miscarriage, so be it.
It didn’t.
In the gray light of dawn, there were eleven dead and two survivors: Mark Zaltan and an infant no one could identify. The babe squalled.
“A miracle child,” Father Ramon murmured, his face gray with exhaustion and dust. “We will take him.”
Inez was dead. It was Grady who found her, working tirelessly despite his bulk. Shirtless and sweating, he approached Carmen, and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I found your cousin. I’m sorry.”
She looked past him. He had draped his shirt over the face of the twisted form, but she knew the dress it was wearing. Her voice caught in her throat. “Thank you.”
Grady patted her shoulder. “And what I said before… forget it. Doesn’t matter. We’ve all got to stick together.”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Out of respect, the soldiers offered to carry the dead to the church. But something had changed. A balance had shifted; a line had been crossed. The Outposters refused the soldiers’ help. Aid to the living would be accepted; Mark Zaltan with his crushed rib cage was taken to be tended by doctors on the base. But the dead belonged to Outpost, and they would tend to their own.
Carmen Garron helped carry her cousin’s body to the church. It was not the first time she’d seen death, but it was the first time she’d seen death by violence—seemingly random violence. She grieved for Inez and the others laid out, awaiting their coffins and a swift burial. She thought about Grady’s words, unable to forget.
The sirens on the base remained silent.
She thought about Martin’s words, too. She wished she’d never heard them.
She wished she’d never given voice to them. The thought that she might be responsible for provoking the attack that killed Inez horrified her to her core. Still, the doubts remained.
If it had truly been an attack by El Segundo, how was it that the army was so sure it was over?
SEVEN
Fear and grief.
That was what Carmen Garron remembered most about carrying Martin’s child after he vanished. They were months of fear and grief. The army poured men into the base. Patrols were tripled, swarming the cordon. Soldiers went over the wall; soldiers claimed to have captured one of El Segundo’s top men. Claimed to have found a cache of weapons.
No one in Outpost rejoiced.
There was a sullenness that had set in—a realization that they were trapped here. That they would never be a target if it weren’t for the base. That the soldiers could leave and they couldn’t. It made them resent both sides of the conflict in equal measure.
But only Carmen doubted the news.
As her belly swelled, the fear and grief and doubt grew. She went to church and made her confession to Father Ramon, pouring out the tale of Martin-with-no-last-name, the Lost Boys, his departure, the missiles. The fact that the child growing in her womb might not be wholly human. There was no confessional booth, just the two of them, talking. Father Ramon listened, smoking a cigarette, his dark, piercing eyes narrowed. “What do you think?” he asked when she had finished. “Speak from the heart.”
“I think Martin told the truth,” she whispered. “And it scares me more than lies.”
The priest-who-wasn’t-a-priest blew out a meditative plume of smoke. “It would explain a hell of a lot. But I think it is best if these words remain between me, you, and God, who doesn’t seem to be listening anyway. Don’t speak of it aloud again.”
Father Ramon stubbed out his cigarette and rose with careless grace, laying a hand on her bowed head in benediction. He bent to kiss her brow, his breath smelling of nicotine. “Whatever the truth, do your best to love the child. Mercy and compassion are all the grace left to us.”
“Okay,” Carmen said. “I’ll try.”
She went into labor during the Festival of Santa Olivia. For as much as Outpost had forgotten and been forgotten, it remembered its patron saint’s feast day. Orphans from the church carried Santa Olivia’s effigy into the town square and placed her carefully on a dais. Townsfolk carried baskets of food in their arms in emulation of the child-saint and picnicked in the square.
Once there would have been banners and streamers and fire-crackers, but the first two were too costly and the last had been outlawed. But there was food and music, and for a day, Santa Olivia remembered what it had been.
Her water broke without warning in the early afternoon. The contractions came hard on its heels, hard and fast. Too fast. Carmen stood dumbstruck and dripping, Tommy tugging at her hand. There was commotion all around her.
“Carmen.” Hands clasped her shoulders; Sister Martha’s intent gray-blue eyes gazed into hers. “Can you walk to the clinic?”
“No.” Another wave struck, doubling her over. “It’s coming!”
Maybe God or nature had some small measure of mercy left, because Carmen didn’t remember much afterward except pain and the shocking swiftness of it all. Not the resurgence of the panic she’d managed to keep at bay since visiting Father Ramon. Not the humiliation of giving birth in the town square. Not the worry over Tommy’s whereabouts that dogged her between the swift contractions. Only pain building and building, then Sister Martha’s voice telling her yes, push; now, already.
And then it was over.
Carmen lay panting, her head pillowed on the knees of an unfamiliar girl—one of the church’s orphans. A throng of others surrounded her, their backs to her, keeping the crowd at bay.
There was a single thin, angry squall, then silence. She made an effort to lift her head. “Is it?”