His steps thudded against the entryway below.
Courtney pressed behind the open door. As she did, her eyes found something she could use as a club leaning against the back of one pew: an old crucifix, the cross snapped with one arm missing. It was at least two feet long.
“Courtneeeey. C’mon…we can have other babies.” He was halfway up the stairs. “This one will feed the earth…we can be together…”
On cue, another contraction captured all her strength. She pressed a hand into her mouth and bit down, drawing blood — a warm, metallic taste in her mouth.
He stepped out of the stairwell with his face turned away from the door. The side of his shirt was dark and heavy with blood. He favored his right foot — a sprained ankle — as he moved to the front of the loft.
“Where are you?” he growled, surveying the sanctuary from above.
The contraction evaporated. Courtney swallowed her breath and summoned all her remaining strength. She crept a few steps from her hiding place, snatched the crucifix, held it aloft like a bat, and rushed toward Zach before he could turn around. His head cocked slightly, but jerked downward as the wooden artifact splintered across the back of his skull. With a howl of pain, he lurched forward, nearly tumbling from the railing. The knife fell from his hand and clattered to the floor below. Blinded with the ache in her womb and sheer terror of the moment, Courtney charged again with the remnants of her weapon, using it as a lance. The wood caught him in the small of the back, and he toppled over, landing in the sanctuary below with a wet thud.
She tossed the broken crucifix to the floor and caught herself on the railing. Another contraction rose from her belly. They were coming quicker now. She peeked over the edge at Zach’s body, broken against the scattered pews, arms splayed at awkward angles. She swallowed her breath and slid to the floor with her back pressed against the railing.
Footfalls sounded from the stairs. Her eyes flickered as Weedeman and Olson pressed close to her. The last thing she heard was Olson’s voice as he said, “my god, the baby. We have to get her to a hospital.”
When Courtney opened her eyes again, she was alone in a hospital bed. She shivered her body suddenly cold. The room was quiet, dim, the shade of twilight lying across everything like a thin shroud. Her stomach was dead — she touched the bulge in her belly, but the baby was gone. Gone. With trembling effort, she rolled off the side of the mattress and staggered toward the door.
“Honey, you should be in bed.” A plump nurse caught Courtney’s arms.
Courtney studied the woman’s hands — pink and healthy looking. She was safe. “My baby?”
“Yes…I suppose a little visit wouldn’t hurt.” The nurse smiled. “We have him in the nursery — while you were out, we were keeping an eye on him. The doctor was a little worried about his color…”
“Color?” Courtney shook.
“Just a little pale, but he’s fine.” The nurse helped Courtney to her bed and returned with a wheeled basinet. She lifted the swaddled infant into Courtney’s arms. “Here you are sweetie. I’ll check on you in a minute.” She stopped at the door. “Oh, and you have a visitor.”
Courtney nodded without thinking. He was hers, she knew. But the skin — his skin was grey, almost translucent — like all of them, the cursed in Broughton’s Hollow. Her arms shook. “No…no…no…”
“Yes. I’m afraid so.”
Courtney bristled at the voice. Mr. Weedeman stood in the doorway, looking even more ashen than usual in the artificial light.
“He belongs to us. We buried his father in the hollow field.”
“No,” Courtney began to sob.
“Zach’s blood made a pact with the land. A little sacrifice. The baby belongs to us. The baby will stay with us.”
3: Tesoro’s Magic Bullet
Tesoro comes home with a bullet on a chain around his neck. Not just any bullet, but the bullet, the one that the doctors pried from his ribcage, the one that should have killed him, only it didn’t. It didn’t even look like a bullet anymore. Now, it is a lump of lead, a misshapen mass of grey metal in a small bag dangling above the Marine Corps tattoo on his chest.
“It’s a magic bullet,” he tells his little brother the first night. As he does, his breath reeks of stale blood like the stains on their father’s work clothes after a shift at the meatpacking plant. Saul turns away.
Despite the smell, the ashen hue in Tesoro’s cheek, they are brothers. Saul basks in Tesoro’s machismo and wants to be a Marine one day.
On the mornings after Tesoro’s late nights, Saul sleeps late and skips school. In Garden City, a place of pork and beef processors surrounded by Kansas plains, no one notices, no one wonders about another Latino kid missing school. The teachers lose count of their shifting student body, and Saul becomes less than a number. He sleeps late those mornings. He sleeps easier because the sun is up, warming his bed through the open window. Bad dreams hide during the daylight, so Saul sleeps a black sleep with no dreams.
It happened like this:
Tesoro was on foot patrol in Baghdad. A car exploded, bright flames pushing the sky. The other Marines tensed, took cover. Tesoro didn’t move, watching a woman stream from the flames with a tail of smoke. She screamed louder than the bellow of the burning wreck, and the sound solidified his flesh just long enough. Too long. When the bullet broke through his chest, tearing cloth and skin and bone, his ears lost everything: the screaming woman, his sergeant’s barking voice, the fire, and the crunch of his body on the rocky dust. His ears lost everything except the snap of that bullet, the sound coming after it cut into his body.
A moment later, return fire from the Marines sounded distant, like firecrackers under metal cans. The blue sky lay across his dying eyes like a shroud.
In the evenings, after all but Tesoro dine together at the table, their father listens to an AM radio station that broadcasts the news in Spanish. He sits in his chair, worn and tired; lines like wrinkled leather punctuate his face. His finger taps against his lips as he listens.
The radio announcer reads the police reports, and sometimes their father mutters, “Dios mio.” His head hangs as he listens to the report of another body, a dead Latino teen found in a ditch outside of town. The Spanish station alone reports the missing. The only pattern to the tragedy is that the victims have been the children of undocumented workers — killed by a bullet in their brainpans. But the bodies were mauled after death, mangled and partially eaten. He listens and tries not to think of the layer of dust on Tesoro’s truck. He tries not to think of his son’s late nights. He fights against the horrible visions of those victims — bodies that must share a raw, red color with the beef carcasses hanging in the plant cooler.
In the kitchen, their mother scrubs the sink, pushing hard with the wire brush to blot the sound of the announcer’s voice while Saul sits at the little table and ignores his homework. The kitchen stings of bleach before she is through. Tesoro’s truck rumbles in the yard — the ’62 Ford that he promises to paint one day and their father once joked was dead and resurrected. The joke died when Tesoro came back with the bullet around his neck. The truck still wears patches of rust like bullet wounds.
Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.