Revise and Resubmit, fiction by Nick Mamatas

1. You find HTML difficult to learn, and you don’t trust those various blog platforms. There are still the old ways—the weapons of the X-ACTO knife and mimeograph. The truth must get out. 

Here is the truth as you recall it. The subways used to be clean. When a man felt the call of nature, he could use the restroom right on the platform. It would be clean, well appointed with liquid hand soap—clear, not pink!—and TP rolls cut to industrial standard. It wasn’t even the blacks who ruined the public bathrooms with their lack of care for the commons, their desperation to sell copper pipes and chrome taps for drug money, it was the homosexuals. They just had to suck one another, bugger one another, all hours of the day and night. Evacuation is a revolting enough activity under the best circumstances, but the mouth meeting the penis, the penis meeting the anus, the anus meeting the mouth, the anus meeting the penis, like filthy Tinkertoys…

Now even the white man has to hold it, or piss himself, or somehow find a quiet moment behind a concrete pillar on the subway platform, just like any savage.  No shopkeeper or restaurateur is kind enough to do a well-dressed, perfectly groomed, white man the favor of letting him use the facilities without a purchase. Your grandmother worked in a coffee shop when you were young. She’d let people use the restroom; she’d offer a first free cup of coffee after midnight to the late custom. Her Jew boss would have surely complained had he wasn’t already abed with his obese wife likely clammy from Lord knows what exertions, but what the Jew didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. She wanted to be alone at night with men sitting at her counter. It made her feel safe to be surrounded by white men.

2. You aren’t the man you used to be, and not only because the Jew took your job and drained your bank account of the precious funds your father and mother left you when they passed. You’ve lost a step. Your peripheral vision is collapsing into a dark tunnel. The pamphlet is ready, but you dare not hand it out on the streets. For every interested person you make contact with, there might a Jew or black who can somehow “pass”, despite the years you spend studying the science of racial realism. Plus, those black-masked terrorists with their homemade weapons and swarming numbers are just a text away. Jobless children supported by the miracle of compound interest, with nothing better to do with their lives than assault others for their opinions in the hope of “going viral”, whatever that is.

They’re already a disease.

You dare not publicly solicit, so instead you once again use the old methods. Wheatpaste and a bucket, late at night, when the traffic lights give orders to streets empty of traffic, when the diners are closed, when you can piss down a flight to steps to the subway station without audience or embarrassment.  Wheatpasting is really an endeavor designed for two, but you are at the moment of a movement of one. You have comrades, but they’re all far off in other cities, and you communicate entirely via a circle of round-robin correspondence, and then in code. The Jew owns the internet, but more than a few of your comrades work for the Postal Service. They revealed long ago the trick to free letters—just put the address you’re mailing to as the return address, and your own address as the destination. Leave off the stamp. The letter will be “returned to sender” every time. If the government insists blindly on treating everyone as equal, take advantage of the blind spots.

It’s a long night, but the streets seem longer, and it’s a challenge to hold the folder containing your leaflets by pinching it between your left arm and ribs, the bucket handle hanging from your elbow, as you brush the paste onto a lamppost with your right. Then you must gently put the brush back in the bucket in such a way as it doesn’t fall into the mush, slide a leaflet out of the folder without ripping the paper or dropping the folder, and plaster it up without getting your hands sticky, or glue under your finger nails. A block’s worth of available pasting space takes twenty minutes. Your arm cramps as the folder grows thinner and you have to keep your muscles tensed. For the white race you’re doing this, for your white children and for the two of your grandchildren who are white. Little Cicero, well…

It’s nearly three o’clock in the morning when you arrive home. Do people even call this hour three o’clock in the morning anymore? Three AM seems to be the fashion. Everyone is like a machine these days.

3. Waiting is the hardest part. Possible contacts are often the last to call the number on the leaflet. It’s not even pranks, vulgar children, and threats that fill your answering machine. It’s journalists, the maggots. Always wanting a quote, offering a coffee, even wondering if they could visit “headquarters”—you can tell from their tone that they already know that White Political Allegiance is headquartered out of your three-room railroad apartment. Wouldn’t it be a laugh, to show the man who wishes to lead the Master Race sitting in his boxer shorts on a stained old reclining chair positioned right before his television set? Then come the hysterics screaming “Nazi!”, which just showed that they only skimmed the leaflet—you’re a race realist libertarian. Monkeys don’t have markets! Then the punks with their threats and challenges, which they wouldn’t dare make if this godforsaken chocolate city allowed for concealed carry.

It takes weeks for your co-thinkers to reach out. You’ve learned not to grow upset when your handiwork is ruined, when the contact information at the bottom of your leaflets are scraped away. It’s these men, and twice even women, who do it. They need to meet you, but these exemplars of the West and the Race aren’t quite so courageous as they should be.

Truth be told, even those who reach out to you rarely do much more than accept the reading list you proffer them over coffee. It’s your fault, truly. The logo, the rhetoric, it all hints at a large worldwide movement to reclaim the world, to cleanse it. There are perhaps forty of you, and you are one of three men in this city. Who wouldn’t be disappointed to find that the future of white children and families depends on a handful of old men who have been crushed under the weight of Marxist oppression and horrific black violence?

You’ve grown used to disappointment.

4. You vote in every election, from President down to county coroner and school board, though with the school you often find yourself just spoiling a ballot. Nothing but a list of names such as Martinez, Washington, Ho, McDonald… You haven't met a white Washington or McDonald in this city in a very long time. Voting is like flossing—mandatory but it never seems to help with bleeding gums.

Then one day there is a candidate seemingly worth voting for, and not just for county committee of the Republican Party, or local sheriff. You’re not as enthusiastic as the race-denier right, not a sucker for his glad-handing and simple slogans, but the man is a wedge. He says what Presidential candidates must not say, and he does it without apology. And what he says shifts the Overton window. People are talking about whiteness again, and without hissing the end of the word as though the very notion were a curse. 

But what did it mean for you, old soldier in the race war? Your PO Box was filled with crudely drawn cartoons of pink-haired girls and sad frogs, and these were gifts from the people…children? simpletons?...purportedly on your side? More journalists to ignore, but a few public gatherings to attend. One young fellow who had the backing of family money and the genetic advantages of perfect Aryan physiognomy greeted you warmly at an event, and turned to talk into the smartphone of a comrade to introduce you to the internet. Your early writings inspired him, he said. He misquoted you, but only slightly.  Your actual famous phrase, the one that has become a meme, is There is no one else who will fight for us. We must fight together, for the future of the worldwide white race. He put it, “If we’re to have a future, we must, the worldwide white race, fight together.” No wonder he stammered twice. And you just had to stand there, unsure whether to offer an avuncular smile or a stoic and determined frown.

Ultimately, you grimaced.

5. You wonder now, why bother? We’re much alike, you and I. We’ve both been fighting for our causes, diametrically opposed as they are, for decades, in the old way. Steady leafleting, pamphlets, the creation and cultivation of small yet flexible affinity groups. Always an arm’s length from violence and street battles, though always armed and ready if “it goes down” as the kids these days say it. Yes, that probably is a borrowed phrase from African-American vernacular. I can see that grimace again, despite the sack over your head.

How right am I? I give myself a solid A-. Perhaps I’ve made a few assumptions, trafficked in cliché a tiny bit. Perhaps you once had a wife who supports your politics, or a common-law husband who doesn’t. You wouldn’t be the first fascist to be caught up in the ironies of masculinities, social progress, and the law. Champion the Aryan physique, declare the woman inferior and undomesticated, you’ll find that some of your comrades have joined the movement for access to lonely men.

Not a twitch, despite the ties binding you to your chair being fairly loose. Stoic or just uninterested in my theories? It hardly matters. What matters is this. You don’t count, not any more than I count. Nobody reads my pamphlets either, my presentations on post-state post-kyriachy futures at various anarchist gatherings and socialist fora are as poorly attended as your funhouse mirror versions of the same, and like you I was never much of a brawler. I have over one hundred students per semester, and almost none of them ever do the assigned reading, much less comprehend it. I’m as poor a revolutionary as you are a race warrior.

What I am good at is demographic divination. My masters degrees in sociology and English are good for something beyond teaching rhetoric and composition at the community college. I spotted you. You’re hardly the only older white man to skulk around on the periphery of the meetings we hold on campus—even an adjunct can reserve a room in the evenings—to ask questions at the end of a panel that mean nothing more than “But why not consider that which you have already rejected—that which I believe?”

You referred to globalism, not corporate globalization.

You claimed that since race is a social construction, it is “scientifically ignorant” to treat people of color differently, and instead suggested “that each group seek its own way.”

You discussed the importance of focusing on “the nation’s working class and small producers” instead of appealing to the international proletariat.

That’s the funny thing about you fash. You can’t simply pretend to have utterly mainstream politics. You have to signal to your fellow travelers, even as you try to infiltrate the far left; centrist politics; the garden-variety right-wing of the petit bourgeois, the banker, and the God-deluded. You fascist creeps, always attempting the fascist creep.

No, we on the left don’t do any such thing. We don’t want to associate with you, we don’t want to penetrate your spaces, enter your parties. You need to be crushed like insects. Not after we gain power, not after capitalism is overthrown. Anywhere and everywhere.

6. Fascism is ultimately capitalism, and especially capitalist morality, metastasized. If you could speak, if I hadn’t stripped you of your briefs, coated them in Krazy Glue, and shoved the mass into your mouth, and tied you to your own recliner, you’d try an appeal to horseshoe theory. You know, how Communism, most often Stalinism, is indistinguishable from fascism? How left anarchism smells like right-libertarianism? The political spectrum bending into a horseshoe, both extremes arcing toward a black hole of violence, oppression, and genocide.

But but…this is torture! Wouldn’t that make you as bad as I am?

You’re nodding, but that isn’t quite right. You’re old and clever. You’d say as bad as I supposedly am? You’re not a violent man, I can tell that much from the conspicuous lack of scars. Your limp is that of a sedentary office worker whose only socially necessary expenditure of labor is the sequestration of carbon, not that of a former street fighter. You’ve never harmed a hair on anyone’s head. Why do this to you and not to one of the badasses who have put my comrades in the hospital?

Embedded in that argument is an axiomatic masculinist demand. Untie me and I’ll show you, you bitch! Neither of us are any good at fighting; we’d just throw haymakers, roll around the floor for a bit, I’d try to scratch your eyes and crush your testicles; you’d try to mount me and punch and grapple in a manner similar to sexual assault in the hope of triggering me. We’d both be exhausted after two minutes. I might have a heart attack. You would have a heart attack. You hide behind phalanxes of boneheads and star-spangled meth-addled bikers. On my side of the line, I’m a medic. I do my bit. I have my ways. 

Also, you’re in no condition to fight. You may not recall precisely what happened, but I’ll tell you: I saw you on the street weeks ago, putting up your leaflets, and recognized you from your skulking about at the edges of one of my events. I tore a number of your leaflets down. When you didn’t rush out to replace them the next night, or the night after that, I dug one of them out of the trash. Then I waited a couple of weeks and had an older, white, comrade, call you to arrange a meeting. He no-showed, but I was there.

Well-dressed women of color are invisible to you. That which you cannot conceive you cannot perceive. Whores, maids, mammies, or leeches. That’s all you ever see of us.

It was easy to follow you home. I didn’t even have to wear a hat and sunglasses. That was two weeks ago.

You live in a dump, and you’re an old white racist. You have a couple of unofficial deadbolts on your door, but I had your leaflet and your building superintendent is a nice man from Puerto Rico whom you mistakenly call Juan—that was the name of his brother, the former super. Both were once part of Los Macheteros; lucky break for me, but I would have found a way in regardless. Tonight Yeriel and I worked together to take the front door off the hinges so I could gain entry, then we put the door back up behind me.

Why? Because something has to be done about you, and I have the capability. I don’t hold to bourgeois morality. You and yours may fancy yourselves übermenschen, but in the end you’re just men who came in second in the game of Monopoly Capitalism and seek to start over with more property cards. We seek to overturn the board.

When you walked in, wheatpaste bucket in hand, was the first time I ever successfully used my Taser.

It’s recharging now. According to the instruction manual, it’ll be hours before I can use it again. That’s okay. We have all night.

Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Bullettime and The Second Shooter. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and several volumes of Akashic's city noir series.

Giving the Light, fiction by Nik Korpon

“La primera regla,” Lalo started, then paused, regrouping. “La unica regla es,” he said again for emphasis, “we don’t stop for no one. ¿Entienden?”

He surveyed the group standing before them, beads of sweat cutting rivulets through the dust coating their faces. Many huddled close to loved ones, mothers holding children, grandparents and their grandchildren making an already-dangerous trip even more so. A small girl, not more than two, kept her eyes pointed down, her arms wrapped around her father’s leg as if that would protect her from whatever awaited them on their trip across la frontera. The father cleared his throat, calling for Lalo.

“Pero…la migra?”

“No me importa la puta migra, eh?” Lalo made a point to look down the line again, ensuring everyone was paying close attention. “You see la migra, you hide. If you can’t hide, you run.”

“Pero,” the father said again.

Lalo whipped his glare toward the father. He could feel the sun beating down with a hundred small razors, pummeling the crown of his head, splitting his skull as they remained hidden behind a rock outcropping five kilometers from the shallow river they’d cross to reach el norte. He’d barely slept the last ten days, what with Pilar’s sickness getting worse. His abuela told him the first trimester was always the worst and it’d get better, but it seemed like the opposite: They didn’t even realize she was pregnant till she was nearly twelve weeks. But as she got closer and closer pa’ dar la luz, she seemed to be getting more and more nauseated. 

And answering all these pinche questions was making Lalo even more irritable. He just wanted to get these people across la frontera, get his money from el Tuerto’s man, then get back home to el Llanto and be with Pilar. Just a few more hours till dark then, they’d be on the move.

The father cleared his throat again.

Lalo exhaled hard. “¿Qué?”

“Pues,” the father stammered. “What about los Cazadores?”

Lalo swallowed, setting his face to remain stern and maintain the group’s confidence. El Tuerto’s people had people inside la migra, so they could get their patrol schedules and reduce the chance one of their coyote groups ran into armed agents. But los Cazadores? Those crazy-ass redneck gringos who couldn’t get it up without holding an AR-15? Hell, they called themselves the Hunters, which was all anyone needed to know.

The father fixed his gaze on Lalo while he waited for an answer, his nervousness seemingly awakening the daughter, who finally raised her head, making Lalo’s hair stand on end. Her eyes were impossible, an aberration, like the entire sky above el Llanto compressed into two bright dots in her cherubic face. They were the same color as Pilar’s, the same color he imagined his daughter’s would be. He felt a pull inside him and considered walking away from this whole thing for a moment, heading directly home to Pilar and resting his head on her stomach to listen to his daughter’s heartbeat. But as soon as the thought arose, it passed. He wasn’t helping people cross to score points with el Señor. He did it to earn money for his family.

“Si tú ves los Cazadores,” Lalo said, “reza.”

Because praying was all they could do.

Debris pocked the river bank. Clothes tossed aside to cut weight during previous trips. A rusted propane tank. Metal scraps fashioned into weapons to defend against desert predators of various species, some on four legs, others not. The wallet of someone who had underestimated the current.  

From where they crouched behind scrub brush, it appeared as if the water was lapping low against the soil, which was a good sign. The river was less than two meters at its deepest, enough that an adult could normally cross it with their head held up. But when a freak storm hit the mountain range a few kilometers miles upstream, water would rush down the gully fast enough to catch even a strong swimmer unaware and sweep them into a muddy abyss.

But tonight, Lalo watched the moonlight glitter on the surface like the tiara he’d place on his daughter’s head at her quince in fifteen years and hoped it was a portent tonight would be uneventful. He crept toward the edge of the brush, reminding the group of the plan as he passed, then peeked through an opening, up to where his partner Sergio waited, surveying the area with binoculars.

From this point, they could see faint headlights tracing up and down Route 9 in New Mexico. After Lalo led the group across the river, they would run as fast as they could to a small hideout on the US side el Tuerto’s people had dug in the sand where they could regroup, drink some water, address anything that needed addressing before making the last push across the highway to a truck stop where they’d be loaded into a produce truck and taken to wherever Tuerto said to take them.

“Estamos jodidos,” one of the group said.

Lalo came back around. “What’d you say?”

Everyone in the group looked at each other, a combination of shrugs and unwillingness to snitch on another.

“You.” Lalo pointed at the man, a scar running from his temple into his hairline, where it disappeared. “What’d you say.”

Not a question.

“Dije que estamos jodido.”

“Why are we fucked?”

“Should’ve done like my nephew. Got a visa and just never left.”

“He get a student or worker visa?”
 The man hesitated. “Student.”

“For what university?”

Again, the man hesitated. “Stanford.”

“Could you get into Stanford?” Lalo said.

The man didn’t answer.

“Then shut the fuck up and get ready to run when I tell you, ¿vale?”

He pulled back his shoulders, looking around for support from the others, but quickly crouched back down when he found none. A quiet moment passed, the group either whispering novenas or watching Sergio or seeing whether Lalo would strike out against the dissenter. When nothing happened, the man felt confident enough to speak up again.

“Should just go over and claim asylum. Demasiada violencia. Enough of us seen heads in our pueblos to claim that, ¿no?”

Lalo sighed for what seemed like the thousandth time, then crept back over to the man, staying low and out of sight. “You want go over there and claim asylum with those Nazis lording over them?”

The man started to argue, but Lalo cut him off.

“How’d you get that scar? Cartel fight? Smuggling drugs up your culo?”

“Someone doesn’t know how to use a scythe, how I got it.” The man postured like he was indignant.

“And you think that’ll matter to them?” Again, Lalo gestured toward el norte. “They see a scar, they think criminal. They’ll put you and any chamaco near you in a cage as quick as they say freedom fries, ¿entiendes? So you want to claim asylum? Hágale, pues. Buena suerte con ese.”

The man snuffed from his nose a few times, trying to save face before settling down, resigning himself to the situation. Lalo didn’t like working like this, for a man like el Tuerto, but what kind of choice did he have? A degree and work experience didn’t mean shit when there was no one to hire you. And as much as he hated herding these people across, the idea of them hauling their kids over a thousand miles of jungle and desert in order to get away from heads tumbling through the streets of their aldeas only for them to rot in cages like discarded fruit nearly brought him to tears. All he could envision was his future-daughter duct-taped to his back as he slogged across the barren land.

A sharp whistle cut through the night. Sergio waved his hand.

“Chicos. Vámanos,” Lalo whispered, motioning toward the river for the group to follow.

Sergio helped lead everyone toward the safest place to cross, a thin sandbar that only reached waist-high. It wouldn’t be quite as easy for the ones carrying small children but was better than any alternative. He stood in the middle of the river, herding everyone across as Lalo brought up the rear, keeping everyone together. The man who’d challenged him passed by, not raising his eyes and gladly accepting Sergio’s help when he stumbled on a rock or something hidden beneath the surface, as if by profusely thanking one of the coyotes, the other would also receive gratitude. Lalo didn’t care; he just wanted this night over.

The father was one of the last ones to come to the river’s edge. His daughter hesitated, testing the water then jumping back as if something had bit her toes. Lalo felt the night tilt around him. Then the father snatched her up and carried her, which Lalo was infinitely grateful for. He followed them as they crossed, the others on the far side already making their way toward the dugout.

Then the father slipped.

It wasn’t much, more like being knocked off true-north than slipping on a banana peel, but it was enough to make him throw his arm out to keep from falling, which threw off his balance on the other side. His arm swung out, dislodging the daughter just enough for her to slip from the crook of his arm.

She yelped as she touched the warm water, as much from surprise as her being two-years-old.

The father reached for her but wasn’t quick enough to stop her from splashing.

She fell to the side, away from her father. She yelped again, this time worse, the tone of her voice sharpened.

Her father lunged over at the same time as Lalo, the father falling into the water to make sure he reached her. Lalo, still upright, missed. The father rose, water cascading off him, his daughter held tight in his arms, protecting her from all else unseen as Lalo shepherded them across the last part of river.

On the other side, dripping but safe, Lalo finally exhaled.

“Por fin,” he said, then pointed at the rest of the group heading toward the dugout. “Vámanos.”

“Espera.” The father was knelt down, tending to his daughter, who was babbling something Lalo couldn’t understand. Zapotek or Lacandón or something from much farther south, the words smothered in wet banana leaves and dense moss.

Lalo cursed under his breath. He thought babying children was an American thing, not wherever they were from. After all, she was just wet. Lalo and his brothers spent most of their free time in the river near their house.

The father looked up and caught Lalo’s gaze, his eyes conveying something paternal that Lalo had never felt before: the urgency of an injured child.

“What’s wrong?” he said.

“Ella está herido.”

“Hurt? She’s just wet. Muévete ya.”

The father lifted up her leg, displaying a gash on the back of her calf, the blood now glimmering in the moonlight.

“Ella tiene hemofília.” His voice was thick with fear for his daughter.

Lalo felt the air tremble around him, the humidty pass over him. “So stop it.”

His hand shook as he pulled a small tube out of his pocket and held it up. Lalo didn’t know what he was looking at, especially not with the moon as the only light.

“Este es desodorante pero solo lo funciona para heriditas.”

It only worked on small wounds? Lalo fought the urge to scream. The cut wasn’t huge, but her skin was wet, making the blood flow more easily. And if the deodorant wouldn’t stop the bleeding on a wound so large, they were going to have to make the wound smaller because Lalo couldn’t let this girl who had his future-daughter’s eyes bleed out in the middle of the desert.

Think think think think.

Lalo had an idea. He called out in whispers. “Sergio, ven acá.”

“Nadie pare,” Sergio called back.

“Ya sé,” Lalo said, trying to convey the urgency of the situation without shouting at Sergio to get his ass back here so they could fix the girl and get gone. “Pero ven acá, ¡ya ahora!”

Sergio told the rest to wait a second while he scurried back to Lalo.

“¿Qué?”

“Gimme your needle and thread.”

Sergio didn’t ask, just dug into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out the contents, dumping it in Lalo’s palm.

“You take them to the spot,” Lalo said. “I’ll take care of this and we’ll meet you.”

Sergio nodded, hurried off without another word.

Lalo held the needle up to the moonlight and slid the thread through, then looked down at the father.

“Tapa su boca y sujétela fuerte.”

Even in the darkness, terror radiated across the daughter’s face. Lalo averted his eyes and focused on the cut.

The skin puckered as the needle touched it, bouncing back when the sharp point slipped through. She gave a muffled yelp and bucked against her father’s firm grip, then jumped again with the needle’s next pass, over and over. Tears glimmered down her cheeks, down her father’s.

Lalo worked his way up, clenching his jaw harder and harder as he cinched the cut further closed, the needle flashing in the moonlight. 

He repositioned himself, trying to keep the wound in the light to make sure it was completely sutured. But the father took the movement as his being finished and relieved the pressure on his daughter’s mouth, just as Lalo shifted her leg, inadvertently pulling the thread tight. 

The daughter’s eyes went wide, almost as big as the sky over el Llanto. Her yelp echoed through the darkness, across the sand, before the father could clamp down on her mouth again.

The father and Lalo froze.

Breath crashed against the inside of his mouth. Blood thrummed through his veins.

A desert rat shuffled through the brush to the west, its feet scrabbling over the hard dirt. A bat flapped overhead, chittering as it chased bugs across the sky. A cereus not ten meters northeast from them breathed a sigh of relief, its blooms opening for nocturnal pollinators. The wind shifted, carrying the faint smell of cigarette smoke.

Lalo scanned the area. No one in sight, not even Sergio and the others.

Then another shuffle, due northwest, maybe fifty meters away. Not a rat. Not a snake either. Bigger.

“La migra,” the father whispered.

Lalo pushed aside a quick thought, looked around frantically, though he knew there was nothing to hide behind. They were caught in the open. The scrub brush would only give them momentary cover. Only real options were to run north or head back across the river, across la frontera and out of la migra’s jurisdiction. Dile a Dios, he thought. “When I say, you grab your girl and you run.”

The father nodded.

Then the heavens opened, bright white light raining down, blinding them.

A bolt of cold shot through Lalo. La migra would call out, tell them to freeze, put their hands up, all that shit. But now: nothing.

Which meant….

“¡Los Cazadores!” the father yelled, already scooping up his daughter in his arms.

Lalo shoved the father northward then took off, feet pounding on the desert floor. Puffs of sand exploded behind Lalo as he ran in the opposite direction, drawing fire away from the father and daughter. He zigged and zagged, cutting across the land, but the puffs drew ever closer. Lalo faked right, then bolted left, toward the river. It wasn’t deep, but maybe he could bound out to the middle, baptize himself in el río, hold his breath tight and let the current take him down—

Lightning tore through his calf. His face slammed into the desert, sand coating his mouth and face as electricity eviscerated his muscle.

His fingers clawed at the ground, pulling his body toward the river. Twenty meters. Eighteen meters more. Fifteen—

A foot smashed against his spine, pinning him in place.

“Looks like you caught one.” The hunter’s voice was thick with smoke.

“Not the one I was aiming for. Them tiny ones are faster than they look,” another hunter said.

“That’s why they’re a good challenge.”

The foot relented, but only to flip Lalo over. The two faces were backlit against the moon, only moving shadows where features should’ve been.

The first hunter said, “Pegged you as the soft touch, stopping to help out that little girl and all. That’s y’all’s rule, right?”

His words had too many vowels in them, distended them, so they became hard to understand.

“‘No stopping,’” the other hunter said, readjusting the rifle slung over his shoulder. “Not for no one. But wherever the cargo go, the boss ain’t far behind.”

“Yeah, I’ve had my eye on you a spell. That bounty on your boss’s head’ll set me right for a long time.” The first hunter crouched down, took a long drag on his cigarette, held it for effect, exhaling only when he spoke. The air shifted around him. “So I’m gonna ask you once, and only once: where’d your friends go?”

Lalo sucked in his breath, steeling himself, staying quiet. Wondering how far away the father and the girl were, if they were hiding, if there were more hunters in the area.

The first hunter laughed to himself. “One of the strong, silent types, huh?” He pulled the cigarette from his mouth and regarded it for a long second. “Okay, then. I think I can help with that.”

And as he lowered the burning cherry down to Lalo’s eye, all Lalo could see was the part that burned hottest, the bright blue part, the same as the sky above el Llanto, where Pilar was waiting for him, pacing their bedroom with a hand on her stomach, counting the seconds between contractions.

Nik Korpon is the author of Radicals, Wear Your Home Like a Scar, The Rebellion's Last Traitor, and Queen of the Struggle, among other. He lives outside Baltimore.