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  AWAKE

  A Novel

  by

  Fernando Iglesias Meléndez

  © 2018, 2019 Fernando Iglesias Meléndez.

  All rights reserved.

  No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]

  Cover by Andrés Iglesias Meléndez

  Author's note: this book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places and events are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblances to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  For my parents, David and Patricia, and my brothers, Andrés and David. Los quiero mucho, amigos.

  ONE

  Smoke. A raging fire. Both of these things are bad. The smoke will irritate their eyes further. His are already dry, sticking to his lids with each blink and peeling apart with a sting every time he forces them open again.

  The fire? It crackles, pops, simmers, casts flags of orange light that flap with the breeze and light up the husk of a building behind them. A beacon. A target.

  These would have been good reasons to smother the fire or avoid one entirely, but they aren’t why he’s so disturbed by it that he can hardy stomach each crackle and pop that sounds off inside the flames. That’s because of what’s cooking in the middle of the fire, stoking the flames and sizzling, almost squealing as things burn, bubble, and waft off of it…it’s a body.

  Luckily, they’d wrapped it in a blanket, so he can’t see its face, but that’s somehow worse. He might have just seen a face blackened and distorted by the flames. Instead, with the head covered, he imagines the face underneath as he saw it last: eyes wide and welling with tears of horror, mouth open mid-plead.

  He pushes that image away like he’s been doing for hours now. The others wanted to move on, which is perfectly logical. The longer they wait, the harder it will be to move at all. But he needed some time to…mourn? That wasn’t quite it. He hasn’t thought about it at all, about him at all. It's just a body. One they're burning because digging a grave would tire them out too much.

  Gerardo sits in front of the fire. Unshaven. Wrinkles like scars. Eyes red, bloated, and hopeless. His face all hard edges, sharpened by exhaustion into something furious yet indifferent.

  “Stop looking at him, man, I thought you said we had to go,” Edu says, approaching Gerardo cautiously, like a man who has only the shallowest understanding of science walking up to a nuclear reactor. Edu’s lean but muscular. His veiny flesh covered in the angry font of gang tattoos. His eyes are like bloodshot sniper scopes.

  Gerardo shrugs Edu’s hand off as he stands. As soon as his body moves, a thousand muscles cry out in pain. He’s been sitting in the same position for hours, his limbs, already sore and indignant due to lack of rest, are now pretty much fused in place.

  Ever since the First Sleepless Night, it’s been a constant battle against their bodies. Gerardo had never given much thought to the inner working of muscles, tendons, and joints. Now, he’s keenly aware of them. Not because he’s studied them, but because they cry out to him. Speak to him. ‘Rest,’ they say. ‘Why are you still awake?’ It’s like his body knows somehow. Knows what’s coming. Knows that every movement, every strain of every muscle, will be paid for later. And the price will be worse than death if he’s not careful.

  In the shadow of the half-built, concrete skeleton sits a massive, tank-like semi-truck. Its six wheels are reinforced with tarp and wire mesh. A steel cage wraps around the front bumper. On the driver’s door, painted with stylistic flair, is the name ‘Gloria.’

  On the semi’s bed is a small metal trailer. It’s not nearly as big as the one you might expect to see on a semi hauling large, commercial cargo. Instead, it’s only around a third of the size. Slits are cut into its sides and rifles mounted on rotating screws stick out of them. All in all ‘Gloria’ is about as big as a school bus from her front bumper to the back of her small trailer. They could have gone for a bigger one but turning the semi around will be hard enough as it is.

  Gerardo pats the semi’s bumper, looking at the truck like it's an old friend. An old friend that’s about to do them a huge favor.

  Diana walks up to the semi called Gloria. She stares at Gerardo, eyes like glinting daggers. She has a crewcut, a huge cross tattooed on each bulging bicep, and a tough face accented by fatigue…she’s a woman you wouldn’t want to fuck with.

  “Gloria was his too, you know,” she says.

  “If he’d had the key, he’d have let them take her with everything else," Gerardo says with a grating voice, like every word claws at his throat on the way out.

  “We’ll never know. You didn’t even ask him anything first.”

  Gerardo’s stung by this, but moves through it, opening a hatch in Gloria’s side. Inside it sits a white brick encased in plastic wrap.

  “That was there the whole time? Maybe that would’ve been enough! Maybe they would have just taken that and—”

  “Diana, he saw me put it there. If he didn’t lead them to it, he wanted us to keep it,” Gerardo says. He drops the white brick into his backpack, zips the pack up, and chucks it through the open driver’s side window.

  There’s a pair of sunglasses on Gerardo's shirt collar, hanging from a fraying button that’s about a spider leg away from falling off. The lenses are scratched and blurred by a hundred greasy fingerprints, but they still work as intended. Without them, the unforgiving sun would be unbearable, would burn through his itchy, achy eyes and cook his hazy, pain-wracked brain.

  Gabo sits in Gloria’s trailer. He’s too young to look tired, it just looks like he's back from a long night of partying. He’s fit, with an innocent, optimistic face. Gabo cradles a beat-up CD player in his hands, holding it the way you might hold a baby bird that’s flapped out of the safety of its nest.

  Edu tosses a duffel bag over Gabo’s head and into the trailer, but Gabo doesn’t budge. He flinches only when he catches sight of Gerardo.

  Gerardo checks his watch: It’s 6:05 AM. He reaches into the pocket of his denim shirt. It’s grimy, caked in gray concrete dust and hit here and there with crusty maroon splotches…blood. Not his. Most of it on the rolled-up sleeves and the collar. Handprints, like someone, had grabbed him and dragged their fingers down his shirt. He pulls a Sharpie out of his pocket and checks his Casio again, like he’s forgotten the fact that he’s just done it. Damn. It’s starting already. Numbers are always the worst, abstract things that blur into unintelligible shapes you have to read over and over again because they just don’t fucking stick. How many bullets you have left sticks. Faces stick too. These days? That’s usually all you need.

  Gerardo writes, '3 a.m.' on his left forearm, retracing the marks so that they don’t fade as quickly under his sweat. Then, beneath them, he writes, ‘15 hours.’ He’ll keep updating that last one. It’ll be easier than doi
ng the math, especially the further they get. Hopefully not much further, but he thinks that number's going to go up to at least twenty-five, maybe forty.

  He can make that. They all can. They’d managed to stay awake for fifty hours before crawling to their stash, but now they wouldn’t have that luxury. Idiot. Fucking idiot. He’d wasted almost two hours just sitting there, staring at the fire like it would speak to him, would maybe forgive him...like it made any fucking difference.

  Those two hours were priceless. They meant two hours less of mental clarity, two hours less of motor function, stamina, mood, and abstract thinking. Most importantly, they’d lose their ability to aim a gun properly two hours sooner. Hell, they’d probably lose that by the thirtieth hour.

  The others have already marked their forearms with their respective numbers. Some in Sharpie, others in pen. Gerardo knows Diana went to bed a little earlier, like always, opting to take her pill ration before the others so that she could pray while the others were still asleep. That meant that she’d be getting tired two hours before the rest of them did, four hours now, thanks to Gerardo.

  In what was now the good old days, they each got to sleep three hours every other night. It was grueling, but survivable. At that rate, they would have had enough pills to last them for a year and a half. They'd take one-fourth of a pill each for a month or so before they would have to up their take to half a pill, then three-fourths the next month, and so on, adjusting for the dreaded way their bodies would acclimate to the pill doses.

  Now, they have nothing. Not even one measly fourth of a pill. They’d even taken the cutter, the small plastic box with a tiny blade meant for splitting each pill into a wide range of portions. It had collected a thick layer of white dust. It would have been Gerardo’s last line of defense. When the pills were gone they could have dipped into the dust for at least a couple of days, maybe a month, while they found something else. Hopefully by then, whatever had caused this would have gone away, or been cured by the CDC or another gringo agency.

  But that doesn’t matter now. They’ll never make it that far. It’s no use thinking about the pills that had once crowded their safe like the world’s finest pearls. Now the safe is empty and their lifeline cut and they’re sinking into that same unforgiving void that had snuffed out millions around the globe, indifferent to social classes and prayers and pleading and scientists clutching at straws…now the Insomnia will swallow them alive. They need to find more sleeping pills…or they’ll be dead in a week.

  “Time to go,” Gerardo says.

  Diana slips on her sunglasses. She’s already sluggish. Her fingers are slow to move and difficult to control. They won't wrap around things right, often tingling, as if falling asleep. Wasn't that ironic?

  If it were up to her, they’d have left hours ago. All they had to do was say a prayer and burn the body. Whether they looked at it or not wouldn’t change things or help anyone move on. Looking at it made it worse. But then she remembers how her mother had looked at her father for hours at his funeral. He’d been lucky to die when he did. Everyone who died back then was. They’d died in a sane world. A world where people still gave a shit about the dead and grieved and prayed. Now, most people died in the streets and cooked there under the hot Salvadoran sun.

  Walking through the trailer door, Diana pulls a pair of sunglasses off Gabo’s shirt collar and places them over his eyes.

  Gerardo pops the driver’s side door open and drops into the seat. The cabin’s nice and cool now, but he knows that’s not gonna last. They can’t risk using the AC, a fact he often has to remind Edu and the others of. He has to enforce this rule despite the fact that, by midmorning, the cabin will be like a sauna. The heat will make them drowsy, enchanting them with the false promise of sleep. They can’t give in to it, can’t afford to let their guard down. They'll just have to fight it, like everything else.

  The interior of the trailer’s as round as a water tank. Lines of sunlight cut through the cramped space from the slits on the walls. It’s a weird place, an almost alien one. It gets as hot as a skillet during the day and painfully cold at night. It rocks and bucks, sending its occupants flying around inside it like the world’s worst bouncy castle. But, Gabo doesn’t mind it that much. It’s better than being in the front, where bullets could shatter the windows or the windshield and dig into his flesh. Instead, when bullets hit the trailer, they bounce off the metal sheets they’d welded onto it, dinging it as if it were a long and ugly bell.

  Gabo sticks his rifle out of one of the slits and looks at the little slice of the world rolling through it. He can handle the world better like that. It’s much easier to process the surreal nightmare when you can only see a couple of inches of it a time.

  “This is bullshit, Gabo. We should bail,” Diana says, looking out through the slit in front of her but not seeing anything. Her eyes are unfocused, teary with pain and betrayal. Her fingers are white and red as they dig into the handle of her rifle.

  “I can’t run out on him,” Gabo says. His voice is croaky and his words are slurred. They’re all speaking like that now, like its 5 a.m. and a bartender just kicked all of them out to a place where their voices are so much louder and unrefined. “He took care of me, of all of us.”

  “Whatever. This Pill Haven? It’s just a half-assed, last-minute attempt to pay for what he did. He probably made it up.”

  “He’s never led us wrong before.”

  “Tell that to Diego.”

  Edu hangs out of the passenger’s side window. He cradles a shotgun in his arms. Next to him, in the driver’s seat, a bit of zen tranquility slips into Gerardo’s features, like he’s about to pray.

  “Toluca Street, Pan-American Highway, El Salvador Highway, Mixco Overpass…the Pill Haven,” Gerardo mutters. Then he pulls out a thermos flask, uncapping it and pouring coffee into the cap. He drains it, then passes the thermos to Edu. Edu’s sluggish, his motor skills shot. The thermos slips out of his fingers and splashes onto the floor.

  “Goddamnit!” Gerardo shouts.

  “It’s fine, I hardly fucking spilled any,” Edu says. He grabs the thermos off the soggy truck carpet as Gerardo turns the ignition. The truck rumbles as it wakes up.

  “Little music to lighten the mood?” Edu asks.

  “Good luck finding it.”

  Edu pushes a button and the radio crackles to life. He twists the dial and the radio pops and buzzes from one abandoned station to the next…until a ghostly, automated voice blasts through the static.

  “—Central San Salvador at the military barracks. The Women’s Hospital and the Miraflores Clinic. If you or anyone in your family or group appears to be able to sleep, contact the United States aid troops stationed—”

  Edu spins the dial impatiently with each word: “Same. Old. Shit.” The last spin thrusts the radio from the drone of dead air into a calm, smooth voice. It’s the polar opposite of the automated message.

  “What’s the word, my lovelies?” the voice asks.

  Gerardo and Edu share a look of recognition. Jackpot. Gerardo rams his foot into the pedal with newfound energy. Gloria’s engine roars. Edu turns the volume up.

  “This is The Last Voice, broadcasting to you from my little barricaded station located…somewhere. You Red Eye fucks won’t ever find it so stop trying. You feeling it in your fingers? You feeling it in your toes? Your eyelids getting heavier? Every movement becoming harder and harder? Your mind slowing like every hangover you ever had combined tenfold? Well, you can’t be too far gone, cus you’re still listening to me. Hopefully, this song’ll jolt you up. Let’s go for one last ride,” The Last Voice says.

  A guitar riff blasts through the airwaves. It exudes a 1970s sexiness. As the chords strum…

  A pale blue sky brightens into orange.

  Gloria blasts through a pile of garbage on the street. Her headlights cut through the dim dawn, parting shambling pedestrians as they run from the light like bats. She swerves past boarded-up buildings smothered in si
gns: ‘SLEEPING PILL RATIONS DEPLETED. GO HOME.’

  It’s San Salvador, a beautiful city marred by hundreds of billboards and the ever-present spiderwebs of tangled power lines…and it’s all under the shadow of a colossus of a volcano. There are trees on every street, splotches of green in an artificial rainbow of paint on concrete. Rusted, raised pedestrian walkways loom over streets littered with hundreds of wrecked cars.

  A pair of men in military fatigues sway with the wind. Their heads have been nailed to a street light, letting the rest of their bodies hang loose. A sign draped over one of their necks reads, ‘PILLS OR BLOOD, UR CHOICE.’

  On a billboard high above the city streets, a woman wearing nothing but her underwear holds a struggling young man with a noose around his neck. His pajamas are grimy, wet around the legs. He’s begging her to stop, but she pushes harder until she throws him off the billboard, the rope around his neck digging into his throat.

  Gloria’s tires screech, the guitar riff shreds.

  “That was the legend, Eric Clapton, by the way," The Last Voice says, "rumor has it that he offed himself in his bathrub. The Insomnia comes for the best of us. Rest in peace, Eric.”

  A man in shredded pajama bottoms hauls a bed into the street. As Gloria shoots past him, he uncaps a jug of gasoline and pours it over the matress. Then he hops into it with a lit match in his hand.

  The psychedelic guitar solo rips through the airwaves. Gloria’s engine growls.

  A slob of a man runs out of a bar. He’s got a brown paper bag in his hand and a look of desperation on his face. BANG! A bullet shatters his jaw as it rips out of his head. A man in a police uniform walks up to the dead man, snatching the bag from his cold hands. Gloria zooms by.

  Gerardo drives past the ruins of a roadside coffee stand. A mob of tired people picks at the wreck. They move like zombies, lurching to pick up stray coffee cups. Two men are engaged in a tug-o-war over a coffee brewer. A broken bulletin board on the side of the road reads, ‘COFFEE…$20 A CUP. NO EXCEPTIONS.’ A bloated corpse lies under it.