He continued for a while, reasoning along those lines. Very interesting, but very useless. Or maybe not, because a little later this reasoning produced a practical result. Some suspicious sounds coming from the dark recesses of the Palacio, as well as the certainty that their situation was unsustainable, made them decide to attempt an escape. It wasn’t that harebrained. The Plaza looked deserted, and the mayor’s Cherokee was parked in front, and was intact: all they had to do was run about fifty yards, jump into the powerful vehicle, and floor the gas in the direction of the Cemetery and Route 3. The already devastated neighborhoods along the way shouldn’t be too dangerous. Abandoning their families, by this time, was already a fait accompli. It had been a while since anybody had answered their home phones. Anyway, they wouldn’t go very far. If they drove toward Bahía Blanca, they would, perhaps very shortly, meet up with the reinforcements they had requested and that had been confirmed were on their way. In fact, the best thing they could do was wait for them there, since it was clear that it would be impossible to launch any effective action from the town itself.
All good, in theory, but when the words “let’s go” were spoken, there was tremendous vacillation. The process of running those fifty yards out in the open to get to the vehicle was difficult for them to digest. What if just one of them went to start the car and bring it to the esplanade in front of the Palacio to pick up the others? They didn’t even bother to propose it — nobody was in the mood for sacrifices. At that moment the medical officer remembered what he’d said, and a solution occurred to him. El Manco. Was he still at the top of the tower? Yes, certainly, but what did El Manco have to do with it? Simple: if we all need endorphins to overcome the animosity and tedium of the world, a cripple would need them that much more. The idea, pretty cunning, was to get El Manco to accompany them on the way out; if they attacked, they’d attack him first, giving the rest of them a few precious seconds to escape.
They didn’t question the humane aspect of this ploy. Since half the town had already perished, what did one more victim matter, especially if he was useless, defective, and semi-moronic? They called him on the walkie-talkie and went to meet him at the little door at the bottom of the winding staircase. They had a good excuse to request his presence: they didn’t want to leave him behind. Once he was with them, they explained their plan of escape — omitting the detail that concerned him — armed themselves with all the blunt objects they could find, and then left. There was nobody to be seen in the Plaza. The moon was very high and very small, like a pale little lightbulb that was difficult to connect to the silvery brightness that bathed the trees and the flower pots. Tonight more than ever, the fountain, the famous Salamone fountain, evoked the oft-made comparison with Babylonian flying saucers. “Ready?” “All together!” “Run as fast as you can!” “The keys?” The mayor was holding them in his hand.
“Go!”
Had they been waiting for them? Had they fallen into a trap, set especially for them? The fact is, they hadn’t even covered half the distance when there appeared about twenty living dead — fast, precise, implacable in spite of their disjointedness— who stood in their way. What happened next took only seconds. The medical examiner’s prognostication was right: all twenty of them fell upon El Manco, cracked open his head, and latched on like piglets taking suck. The others scattered in momentary confusion that didn’t last long because more attackers were approaching from behind the cars parked across the street and the fountains to the sides, so they retreated, running back to the Palacio. They didn’t turn to look at poor El Manco, who had become a pincushion, still standing (he hadn’t had time to fall).
The Palacio had ceased to be a refuge. In fact, several corpses had entered behind them, sending the group racing every which way through dark rooms, up and down staircases, and along corridors. After a few minutes of this “lethal blob,” everybody was thinking that they were the last survivor, and a few seconds later everybody was right, or one was. The mayor, having lost all dignity, was curled up in the back of a wardrobe whose door he closed from the inside, and there he stayed, still and quiet, holding his breath.
Unfortunately, right at that moment, the phone in his pocket, which had been ominously quiet for a while, rang. To make matters worse, it took him a while to find it and silence it, what with the state of his nerves; he looked through all his pockets before looking in the right one. When he finally had it in hand, he answered the call. Precautions were no longer worth taking, and the company of a voice was preferable to nothing.
It was a man calling from Primary School #7, in the name of the School Association, to tell him that they had decided not to support him in the upcoming elections.
He didn’t manage to ask why. The voice sounded resolute and bitter and not at all friendly, even though it belonged to someone he’d known for years, and on whose electoral loyalty the mayor would have bet his life just hours earlier. With what remained of his political reflexes, he tried to stammer out something about it not being the moment to discuss the election, or that he would continue to serve the people of the town in whatever role he could be most useful, without any personal ambitions, but the other man interrupted him before he began, telling him that all the people of the neighborhood shared the opinion he had just communicated, and probably the whole party did, and that he might as well bid the mayor’s office goodbye. After which, he hung up without saying goodbye.
The first thing the mayor thought was that they were blaming him for what was happening. That was unfair in the extreme but could only be expected. He suspected, however, that there was something else going on. He remembered that Primary School #7 had been one of the first sites affected. The person who called him, it would seem, had been one of the victims, and the ill humor expressed in his voice would be the effect of the loss of endorphins, a loss everybody around him would have suffered, the whole damn School Association, and at this point, the whole town. The first thing that had occurred to them in their new state of mind was to initiate a motion against the mayor. Would this be the end of his career? He’d already won three elections, this would be his fourth — he’d been leading the City for fifteen years — and he always won by a large margin. Neither the long years of laissez-faire, nor suspicions of corruption, nor the increase in taxes had put a dent in his popularity or his well-oiled system of cronyism. And now this, the disappearance of a few insignificant mental drops, was going to spell his doom. Did this mean that his tenure could not be attributed to his skill as helmsman of the administration, to his charisma and connections, but rather to the happiness of the voters? Bad moment to discover this. The door to the wardrobe was already open and a silhouette, both inhuman and human, outlined in black against black, leaned over him. In a split second, in fast forward, there raced through his mind all the public works and urban improvements he owed Pringles.