Evie took Maggie’s hand and told her to come. “You paid enough. He’s just playin’.”
Didn’t look like he was playing.
Evie pulled Maggie’s arm, “C’mon.” Maggie took a tentative step, and another, me and Deluski following in her cautious footsteps. I felt an uneasy sickness in my chest. We were foreigners here. Didn’t know the players, didn’t know the rules. Foreigners.
Another beggar approached, this one a child, a protruding bump under his shirt, head shaved bald with some kind of input jack embedded in the center. Christ. Where the fuck were we?
My head swam, anxiety creeping up from my chest and settling around my throat. I pulled the lase-blade handle tucked into my belt, held it tight in my fingers, thumb perched on the button. Deluski paused for a moment to give the kid some money, put it in the kid’s pincer-claw hand.
With my nerves now on razors, I kept moving, eyes bouncing left and right, watching, waiting for the next mind fuck. An occasional truck passed, workers standing upright in the truck bed, their clothes stained from a grueling day in the poppy fields. We passed homes with barred windows, guards sitting out front, resting on tipped-back chairs, weapons slung from their shoulders, glum frowns slung from their chins.
We reached the edge of town, the last streetlight falling behind us, the pitch black darkness a relief to my overloaded senses. Maggie passed her flashlight to our guide. To me she asked, “Can you see all right back there?”
I kept my eyes aimed up ahead, where Evie and Deluski lit the way. “I’m good.”
We crunched our way up the trail, weeds and dead branches snapping underfoot. We’d ditched the road as soon as we’d left town. Told Evie we didn’t want to be seen, asked her if there was a back way.
The jungle trail was rough going. According to Evie, it wasn’t used much, not since the road was built. We tripped through vines and scrub, my lase-blade slicing through the worst. We tramped through streams, pushed through brambles. My thorn-scratched, bug-bitten skin itched in a thousand places. Bug spray didn’t do shit in deep jungle.
The unmistakable roar of a flyer sounded up ahead. We were close. I covered my ears as the grumbling bellow passed overhead, foliage whipping in the wind. I dumbly looked up, caught a shower of sappy detritus in my hair, my eyes, down my shirt. I coughed and spat, shook shit out of my shirt.
Flashlights and laughter, both aimed at me.
I wiped my face with my empty sleeve. A too rare smile broke on my face as I had a good laugh at myself, first time since forever ago. Evie and Maggie brushed flakes of I-didn’t-know-what out of my hair while I winced against the pain of my burned scalp.
On the move again, Evie led the way until the bush finally thinned and opened onto an open field, where a pair of lamp poles dropped cones of light on a broad swath of poppies. We stayed low, flashlights off, watching for activity.
A building sat in the middle of the field, surrounded by several shacks. A two-wheeled track led to the road we’d avoided. A sizable group of people worked the far side of the field, canisters on their backs, sprayers in hand, rags tied over their mouths.
I scanned for guards, scoped five in total, two monitoring the workers, three more patrolling near the main building, a two-story structure constructed of slats and poles under an open-air thatch roof.
I asked Evie, “Is that General Z’s headquarters?”
“This ain’t no headquarters.” She laughed. “It’s just the doc’s clinic. Z runs whole villages up north. I portered a trip up there once.”
“You’re a porter?”
“My cousin is. He took me along as more of a runner. I don’t eat much so it don’t cost much to bring me.”
“Ever seen General Z?”
She nodded. “He comes to Yepala sometimes to meet with his lieutenants and the sheriff.”
“Who is the sheriff?”
“Carlos Aceves. He’s a mean man. You watch out for him. He always wears a panama hat. He and the doctor are friends, which is why he lets the doctor have his clinic here.”
“What kind of clinic is it?” asked Deluski.
She didn’t have an answer for that.
Maggie took a seat in the weeds. “That flyer we heard heading south-think the doctor was on it?”
“Probably. He’s always going back and forth to Koba.”
I dropped down next to Maggie. Might take awhile for that last group of workers to call it quits. According to Evie, they’d walk the road until they passed the mud, to meet a truck that could take them the rest of the way back to town.
Deluski and Evie sat down, Evie right next to Maggie. “Can I see your earrings?” Her tough-girl voice had been replaced by something softer and sweeter.
Maggie pulled them out of her ears and passed them to Evie, who held them low to the ground before turning on a flashlight. “They’re real pretty. Is that gold?”
“Yes.”
“What about the stones?”
“Emeralds.”
“They match your eyes. How’d they get so green?”
“They’re not my original eyes. I was born with brown eyes, just like you.”
Evie hung the earrings on a branching weed and studied how they dangled.
I turned my attention to the poppy field. Slowly, the workers peeled off, dropping their spray cans at one of the sheds and heading for the two-track road where a small gathering formed.
Evie took the earrings off the weed hanger and made to give them back but Maggie put up a hand. “You can keep them.”
“No. They’re too nice.”
“The way you’ve helped us, you deserve something nice.”
Evie forced them into Maggie’s hand. “Somebody would try to steal them by cutting off my ears.” Tough girl was back.
Workers continued to quit, my heart rate climbing as they did. Sneaking in there was going to be tough. Too much open space, and too many guards.
The last few workers headed in, the field lights flicking off right afterward. The compound, however, was still bathed in yellow as workers started to file down the road.
As a group, we moved into the poppy field and slowly started across. The deep dark made it difficult to pick our way through ragged rows of poppy plants, black leaves and stems and pods reaching up from blacker earth. We detoured around the lamp poles, afraid somebody would turn them back on.
Maggie whispered, “This is as far as you go, Evie.”
I counted off some bills for her. “First sign of trouble, you go back the way you came.”
“Got it.”
We crept forward. Only three guards left. The other two were escorting the workers down the road.
We made our crouched approach, slithering through and around the poppies, our goal a wide stack of black tar bricks. Three guards, none looking this way. They were boys, young teens. General Z’s army was a children’s brigade. I doubted many survived long enough to be men.
We slipped behind the stack of bricks and peeked over them and around the side. I grabbed Maggie’s wrist, put my half-arm on Deluski’s shoulder. “You sure you want to do this?”
They both nodded. We had to know what was going on in there, had to know what game Mota, Panama, and the doctor were playing.
We had no choice but to break in and see with our own eyes. The local authorities wouldn’t help. Panama ran YOP.
The planetary authorities wouldn’t help either. This was General Z’s territory, a lawless expanse of jungle villages and O fields. The Lagartan army would never tame this region. Truth was, the pols didn’t want them to. Crush the narco-state and they’d have to stop milking the Unified Worlds for drug enforcement money, which they siphoned into their own pockets.
The three guards stood in a group, close enough that we could hear them chatting. We snuck from one stack of tar bricks to the next, approaching closer and closer, the first shed a few meters away. I looked at the main building. The windows, most of which were dark, were now in plain view. I checked the lighted ones, searching for moving shadows and prying eyes. All I found was eerie stillness.