Where fires are to burn, p.1
Where Fires Are to Burn, page 1
Where Fires Are To Burn
Mark L Watson
Prologue
The tower was three stories from bottom to top and the blackened wall was crumbling, as all walls in that place were. He kept close to the brickwork, his back to the wall.
Ryan slowed his breathing and listened.
The voices were there, ahead of him and behind. He was stooped just slightly, his arm bent at the elbow to keep the pistol levelled.
He crouched down behind a rubbish bin, overflowing with rotten waste, and waited.
He could see, further along the alleyway, the three men standing in the doorway, partly silhouetted by the evening glow. They were talking to each other in Spanish though he couldn’t understand what they said and it didn’t matter regardless. He rounded the bin and approached the fire escape steps on the side of the hospital and watched where he put his feet in fear of betraying his position and alerting the men and others like them. He placed his foot carefully up on to the first step and the metalwork creaked a little and he turned with the pistol but nobody was watching. He bounced up the steps as quietly as he could, trying to step light, as a cat might, while moving as fast as was possible. He could hear the metalwork squeaking and rattling but he had no alternative. He had to run one way or another, he couldn’t stop or the whole thing would be over. As he rounded the top of the fire escape onto the hospital roof he practically threw himself to the floor.
He lay for some time under the white sky, catching his breath and listening and praying that nobody had heard him or seen him there.
The place was silent but for his breathing and the thumping of his heart as it practically battered its way out of his chest.
After a few minutes, when he was sure he was not followed, he stood and hurried across the grey roof, around the old air conditioning units and vents, and reached the door leading to the stairs down into the hospital building. It was locked with a pushbar from the inside as he knew it would be, but he was prepared. He swung the cloth pack from his shoulder down onto the ground and removed from it two screwdrivers. He set about removing the door from its external hinges so as to quietly enter the building from above. He removed the three screws from the bottom hinge and then from the centre one and the door dropped slightly on its own weight and then disappointment and fear suddenly surged through him as he saw, through the gap, the barricade which had been built on the other side.
He stopped.
There were voices again, calling from somewhere.
He listened. His life depended on it.
They came from beyond the door, down on the top floor of the hospital building beneath him. He knew bandits came and went from that place looking for provisions to use or to sell but he had watched the building for three days and was sure they had gone.
He was obviously wrong.
Perhaps they had set a small camp inside or perhaps there were people injured there who had chosen the building as a safe house. Whoever was using that place as a refuge had secured it well to prevent others from doing exactly as he was intending on doing.
He checked the sky. It was darkening. He knew he wouldn’t get through the barricade quietly enough to ensure his safety and the raid would have to be cancelled and reapproached at another time.
More voices. He listened.
They were beneath him, inside the building, but they were also all around him, down in the town beyond, calling loudly across distances to each other in the dusk.
Then he heard it.
A rattling he recognised.
The fire escape.
Footsteps were coming up the metal staircase on the outside of the building. He scurried over towards the edge of the roof and crouched down behind an air conditioning extractor unit. He readied the pistol. He was more than ready to shoot in the head any person who discovered him there but that was the final option he had. A gunshot out there, where gangs moved in packs like dogs and each man was armed, would be like a siren sounding and he was in no position to hold his own in a gunfight with a gang of bandits.
At the very least he could use the pistol on himself he reasoned.
He positioned himself in a manner which allowed him to peer around the straight edge of the metal unit and see across to the top of the steps. After a moment a man walked into view and stood, regarding the rooftop before him.
Ryan pulled his head backwards slightly and watched. He was sure the man couldn’t see him from where he stood but whether or not the man had watched Ryan ascend to the roof was yet a mystery to him.
The man walked to the edge of the metal framework of the steps and called down to somebody below.
Ryan couldn’t hear what was said, growled in a thick Mexican accent.
A moment later the steps rattled again and Ryan watched as four more men came onto the rooftop, some carrying packs, and the last man carrying on his back a basket of wood scraps and all armed with rifles and pistols.
Ryan’s heart raced.
He knew they must have seen him go up those steps to that roof and that he was now indeed cornered. He looked around the metal unit as best he could for an exit strategy and couldn’t see another way down and knew he was three stories up above the broken concrete alleyway. He considered the jump from the edge and weighed in his head the distance and the impact of his fall, and knew that even a twisted ankle would spell the end for him there. He knew also that a twisted ankle was the very best that could be hoped for from that height.
He would wait. He was a good shot and a fast runner.
There was no alternative.
He reasoned in his head that should he succeed in slinking his way silently along the air conditioning units towards the top of the steps that he could make a dash for the steps and could jump from a lower point if required.
He watched the men on the roof.
They didn’t appear to be searching for him at all, talking and laughing, their rifles swinging on straps.
The roof was flat across the rear of the building but rose into a tiled peak at the front side and the men moved to that place and took their packs from their backs. They unrolled blankets and produced other items they would need there and the man with the basket of wood set it down and went about making a small fire and another produced an iron kettle.
Ryan caught his breath, his assumption being that should the men be there simply to make camp then there would likely be some safer time to make a silent escape without incident. The assumption was short lived.
One of the men, dressed in a faded black poncho and a small cap and wearing high black leather riding boots and a slight limp, crossed back to the top of the steps and set across the metalwork a tripwire and clipped the end to a bell and sat back on the vent housing with a shotgun pointed directly at the top of the steps, and from that place he did not move.
The men were experienced, as they had to be out there in the nearly lawless lands of the north. They would not build a camp without also ensuring that it was in a place well protected with weaponry and such and the men would rotate their duties as sentry. The location of that watchman at the top of the steps also clarified to Ryan that there was indeed no other way down from the building, other than through the doorway into the staircase that had been barricaded from the inside and of which the men did not seem to be too concerned.
Ryan waited for he had no option.
He was relieved that he had , at the very least, positioned himself at the featureless rear of the building, and he prayed to whoever may listen that the men should not find cause to venture back that far, though he knew he could not bet against it.
He kept a firm grip on the pistol.
The sky darkened slowly and Ryan waited in that place as the men stoked their fire and ate and drank and took it in turns throughout the night to watch the tripwire and guard the top of the metal steps.
The air was not cold, but Ryan shivered through the night, trying to rest his eyes without falling asleep, until eventually the light spread out behind the white clouds at the horizon and another day broke.
He had crawled silently to the edge of the building twice over that night in the hope of seeing in the shadows a way down from there but the drop was severe and unbroken and on to only concrete below. There were no neighbouring buildings anywhere close enough to jump to and he knew his options were to plummet the distance down, clamber somehow, blindly in the dark, down over the edge onto a window frame or gutter and most likely fall doing so, or to wait out the men and hope he was not discovered.
He waited.
As the light came the following morning he was wrapped in his poncho in a small bundle on the cold stone, the muzzle of the pistol protruding from the fabric. He had not slept.
The bandit who was currently charged with guarding the top of the steps was slouched back where he sat with the old shotgun resting in his lap. He looked to be sleeping, or dozing at least, and the group of other men were wrapped in their blankets across the roof, their fire dead and cold and the tequila bottles empty and smashed.
Ryan watched the guard for some time, considering the opportunity to slowly move his way, and either silently pass the man or to garrotte him where he sat, though he knew that should he be detected at any stage of that plan, which was likely, he would be dead or worse.
He watched out across the crumbling rooftops and the greying sky beyond. There was barely a sound but from the whistling wind, no bird called or insect chirped. He was worried that Kiara would not know where he was and would think some
When the sun was up fully, the men awoke and packed away their blankets and began to cook meat on a new fire and they sat and smoked and argued with each other over everything and nothing.
They milled around the rooftop without cause, passing their time there by fighting one another and they began to drink from big glass bottles and they fought more and all the time Ryan sat behind the air conditioning unit and waited like an injured bird. They took their turns to watch the steps and sometimes they all watched from the roof and sometimes there seemed to be nobody guarding it at all but there did not, at any stage, present a reasonable opportunity of escape. It was twenty feet or more between the end unit and the top of the metal steps and all the men carried guns. They came near to the edge of the building where Ryan crouched and he held his breath and pulled his poncho up to cover his face and aimed his gun at them and this happened once and then twice and then again but the men were by then drunk and he was, somehow, not spotted.
He sat all day until the sun went down a second time. He was bubbling with hunger and thirst and had urinated twice were he sat for he had no other option.
When it was dark the rain came.
Slow at first and then heavier and he pulled his poncho up around his head but it was soon dripping and the rain poured from the wide brim of his leather hat. The bandits’ fire sputtered and hissed and eventually went out and the men pulled themselves under an awning and the man guarding the steps shouted to them to protest his turn at sitting out in the rain and they laughed and threw bottles at him.
The sky was entirely black and no light shone from anywhere around.
Ryan’s mind started to play tricks on itself and his feet and legs were numb. He began to feel very sick and it was, at that time, that he saw the guard rise from where he was sitting and move to the top of the steps with the shotgun raised. There was a sound somewhere below and the guard moved to investigate it further.
He called to the men under their awning but there returned nothing more than a muffled reply and he carefully stepped over the tripwire and descended the steps.
Ryan waited and listened.
He listened as hard as he could against the rain, the metalwork of the fire escape rattled on its old fixings and he heard the man descend all the way to the ground alleyway below and call out again in the night.
He glanced to the rest of the posse who were not moved from where they lay.
He swung the poncho down and rose to his feet, the pistol readied. He leaped through the gathering rainwater to the next metal unit and stooped down and then moved to the last one and stooped again and listened. After the briefest of moments he darted to the top of the steps and hurdled the tripwire and danced down the staircase as lightly as he could.
As he turned at the first platform he could see the man below with the shotgun, walking slowly along the alleyway, calling out at what noise he had heard. Ryan jumped down the second set of steps and threw himself over the railings to the ground below where he crashed onto the old concrete with a loud splash of rainwater.
He didn’t look back to see whether his landing had alerted the man though he knew that it must and he heard the man call out.
He ran.
He ran out of the alleyway without looking back once and around the edge of the building and across the cracked old road at the front and threw himself over the metal traffic barrier and across the open scrubland beyond and away into the blackness.
Chapter One
Ryan was concerned that the cartwheel might need replacing entirely. There were only three of the original eight spokes left and they too were rotten. He had been looking for weeks for a wheel which was suitable to hold up the cart, though it would need to be the same diameter as the other one otherwise he would need to find two of them.
He watched as his son pulled the rickety cart, rattling across the stones.
“Careful, take care with that thing”
The other wheel wasn’t much better.
His son looked over to him and nodded once and slowed. It was too many miles to Linares for them to walk in what remained of that day and Ryan was sure the cart wheel would not make that distance regardless. The road west to Montemorelos was not a safe road to take and he had been told that no military patrol had stopped there for weeks, and any which passed would simply pass and go. They had been forced to take their cart along the farm tracks through the hills and they were approaching the north shore of the Rio San Fernando at Guadeloupe, yet a day’s hike from Linares.
His wife, Kiara, walked at the rear of their group, the sack strapped around her.
She called out.
“The sun dropped behind that hill some time back, we should make camp while there is light”
The son stopped with the cart and looked at his father. He walked a few more paces and stopped too and nodded and surveyed the landscape around him. The hills were low and dusty and hot and the track ran bolt straight through the pinyon and shrub at the valley floor. There were no berries or fruits there to eat and they had not passed a water source for over a day.
“We can make the river” he called back, “but we must try to move quicker”
The son said nothing and slowly began to tow the cart forward.
By the time the track approached the woodland at the edge of the river the sky was completely black and they walked in darkness. The wind had picked up, as it always did, and blew the dust down from the hills and they pulled their ponchos and shawls over themselves and hurried the cart to the shelter of the trees.
“The land is too dry here to risk making a fire” Ryan remarked as his wife took her pack from her back, “we should move a little further to the river”
Kiara watched him and looked at the ground and again at her husband. She could not bear to walk a step further but she knew also that he was right.
“I don’t really think making a fire on the side of the river is safe either, somebody might see it” she said.
They thought for a moment and the boy volunteered to go to the riverside and check for a clearing there and to see what cover the trees provided and the viability of camping secretly there. Ryan crouched to their cart and reached under the front beam and unclipped the metal box that was fixed there, hidden from sight. He sat it on the floor and took the key from where it hung around his neck and unlocked the thick padlock. Inside, everything they cared about and everything of value was piled into the tin. There were three photos of their son Dylan and daughter Mia together and a photo of Ryan’s parents standing shoulder to shoulder and staring blankly into the camera lens, as was once customary. There were eleven matchboxes set neatly beside each other in two lines, each filled with different seeds. Theirs was a time when the old currency of paper and metal was rapidly becoming valueless, though not entirely yet, and trade was conducted primarily in the commodities of more practical use. There was nothing of more use to the ongoing survival of mankind than the seeds of fruits and plants, as from those any man with access to soil could grow himself a future. One box contained seeds of Magnolia and one of wild Geranium, which whilst of mild medicinal usage, were of low value and easily scavenged. There was a box of Agave seeds from across the border to the north and the Blue Agave seeds of that land, both of which were bound together with a rubber band. Two boxes were full to bursting with corn kernels which they had found and, of significantly more importance to them, the seeds of apple, mango, tomato, chilli and cacao. Each of the boxes was guarded well and Ryan knew exactly the inventory of each for it was those boxes which provided his family with the means to trade and beyond that, should they find a place, the means to grow.
The rains had come for weeks on end and the lands were fertile but they had left their own pastures for the south, and with them all crops. There were other items in the tin also, jewellery, some pesos and dollars and a small case of .357 shells.
Laying atop it all was the Colt Python with an 8-inch Royal Blue barrel and wooden grain grip.
