For good measure, Felipe punched Joel2 in the gut several more times, making him double over in the chair. He curled there, wheezing.
“I’m sorry, Joel.” Sylvia looked down at her husband, her eyes bright with tears. And she told him the only truth in all of this. “I couldn’t lose you.”
Danielle clapped her hands together once. “Then we are agreed, bruja. Felipe, comm the gatehouse. Tell them we are ready to depart.”
The guard looked off for a moment, then shrugged. “They are not answering.”
There was a sharp knock at the door of the small room. Felipe and Danielle looked at each other quizzically.
“I told them to stay down there until we were done,” the old woman cursed, walking to the door and opening it. “?Cuándo los tontos te—”
Although the blast came first, the gaping, bloody hole in Danielle’s back was the first sensory input Joel2’s mind latched on to. More blood sprayed Sylvia. The old woman collapsed onto the floor, a puddle of thick dark-red liquid burbling out of the hole in her flickering LED robe.
“?Qué mierda?” said Felipe, running forward, the knife in his hand.
His question was answered in the form of a second blast. Its thunderous reverberation shook the walls and wine bottles. Felipe spun around as a twenty-gauge copper slug took his arm off at the shoulder. His other hand clawed at the now-empty space, then he, too, dropped to the floor and lay still.
Joel2 and Sylvia looked at each other, terrified about what new trauma awaited them. A rustle of clothes shifted their attention to the doorway. Stepping over Danielle’s corpse, gingerly avoiding the growing puddles of blood, was Bill Taraval. He wore a crisp white IT lab coat, now flecked with red drops, over his cargo shorts and floral-print shirt. His breath was shaky. In his hands was the Remington Model 870 Express seven-round, pump-action shotgun Joel2 had become acquainted with earlier.
“Oh my,” Taraval said, letting the shotgun fall to his side as he surveyed the scene. “My, my, my. What a mess.”
Joel2 was still tied to the chair, unsure if he should move. Sylvia, however, stepped forward. “Bill! Thank God. Where did you find that?”
Taraval seemed to come back to himself, lifting the shotgun again and studying it. “Ah yes. The third and most effective of the thirty-six stratagems: kill with a borrowed sword.” He swung it back down, pointing the barrel at Joel2’s forehead.
Joel2 winced. “Hey, man, you mind not pointing that barrel in my face?”
“A perfectly poignant proposal,” Taraval said, nodding. Then he pulled the trigger.
Click.
“Joel!” Sylvia yelled.
Realizing the gun was out of shells, Joel2 tried to get to his feet. The chair still bound to his wrists, he awkwardly ran at Taraval, but the man whipped the shotgun around, swinging the stock into the side of his head. Joel2 slipped in a puddle of Danielle’s blood, cracking his skull against the wall. He dropped back into a sitting position.
“Stop!” screamed Sylvia. She ran at Taraval, but as her hands were still tied behind her back, there wasn’t much she could do but accost him. “What are you doing?”
“What I should have done the first time around,” he answered in a measured tone. “Your lack of objectivity has now pulled me into your derailment. I have been cut loose, set adrift, ruined. And all because of this thing”—he brought the butt of the gun down on Joel2’s face—“you call ‘husband.’” A large wound opened above Joel2’s right eye, blood coating his face. He slumped over, not moving.
“No!” Sylvia cried.
Taraval shook Joel2’s blood off the butt of his weapon. Calmly, he said, “Come now, Sylvia, surely you knew this was how things would end when you messaged me this morning. Even if you are unwilling to clean up your messes, someone must. And not just for me, no. For the benefit of humanity.”
He looked off suddenly, noticing something on the floor. “Fascinating. This must be some sort of—” He meandered to Roberto’s egg-sized device, picked it up, and examined it closely. “A proximity jammer! How clever. Thank goodness he didn’t get a click off on me. You know, Sylvia, for a murder of pacifist crows, these Gehinnomites seem to have a rather ironic affinity for antique weapons, wouldn’t you say?” Pocketing the device, he then advanced on my wife with the shotgun. “Hear that?” Taraval smiled. “No, of course you wouldn’t without use of your comms,” he mused smugly. “It appears paramedics are en route. Well, destiny is ne’er kind to those truant,” he said, taking her by the arm. “Our coach awaits.”
THE ROAD OF TRIALS
FOR A WHILE the ambulance was relentless—rightfully so—in its critique of my driving. At some point, after almost colliding with a produce truck because I was in the wrong lane, I stopped responding to its warnings. The ambulance, in turn, stopped using conversational language with me, reserving its speech for alerts like “Vehicle parked on shoulder ahead” and “Likelihood of collision has increased by thirty percent.”
Ninety minutes into our journey, just as I was getting a handle on the driving thing, the road got impossibly bumpy. It seemed as though it had been intentionally left unpaved by eco-conscious residents, resulting in a tedious, bouncy trip through the foggy mountain roads. My speed wasn’t aided by the entrepreneurial endeavors of townspeople along the way.
The Costa Rica of 2147 was what one might call a second-world nation. Metropolises like San José, Alajuela, and Rincón de la Vieja had first-world facilities and infrastructure, but the rest of the country was still very much a touristy boondock. Therefore, it was no surprise that in Quebrada Grande, the roadway became littered with merchants stepping in front of cars, each attempting to hawk their wares to passengers. I’m certain those peddlers regretted ever stepping foot in front of my ambulance. Especially when I heard a loud bang. I worried I might have hit one of them, but thankfully I had only run over a coconut.
Just to play it safe from there on out, I pushed the flashing siren icon on the console. A blend of tuba-like bass and trebly alerts started blaring from the ambulance. That did the trick. Like the Red Sea parting for Moses, the merchants moved out of my way and created a path.
Following the ambulance’s GDS route, I turned onto a blessedly paved side road that led up the mountain. A proximity alarm flashed, and I winced as a huge people-mover thundered past overhead.
“What kind of psycho would fly one of those things so low?” I wondered, looking back at the huge flying machine. It was already little more than a gray dot in the distance.