And now—now there was nothing we could do for him.
We stood on the balcony and watched as the four rebel gunmen dragged him to the end of the alley. There, they turned the corner around the church and went out of sight.
I wanted to pray, but I didn’t know what to pray. I just kept thinking the name of God over and over again. Finally, I just held my breath. I guess we all held our breaths. It felt to me as if the world itself had held its breath.
A long, silent second passed.
Then there was gunfire—and Nicki screaming.
CHAPTER TEN
It was the worst moment of my life.
Nicki reeled back into the room, screaming and screaming. Babbling words through hysterical tears: “What’s happening? Why won’t anybody help us? Oh, they killed him! They killed him! What’s going to happen to us?”
I turned and saw Meredith rush after her. She grabbed Nicki by the shoulders. Nicki struggled wildly in her grip, her head going back and forth, her hair flying.
“Let me go!” she screamed. “No! No! No! They killed him! I have to get out of here! I have to! I can’t stand it!”
“Stop it! Stop it, Nicki!” Meredith said sharply. She shook her. “Have faith! Have courage! Stop!”
Nicki did stop—for a moment. She stared at Meredith through big eyes ringed with black mascara. Her mouth hung open. “Faith?” she asked, her voice breaking. “Courage?” And then a light of understanding seemed to dawn in her. “Because they’re going to kill us next, aren’t they? That’s why you’re talking about faith and courage! They killed Pastor Ron and they’re going to kill us next!”
Nicki was winding herself up to another fit. But Meredith took her face in her hands, held it hard, forcing Nicki to look at her.
“Nicki,” Meredith commanded. “Look at me. Do what I tell you. Have faith. Have courage.”
Trapped in her grip, Nicki could only go on staring at her. “Why?” she asked. “Why should I?”
“Because they’re all we’ve got,” Meredith told her.
Nicki stared at her another second, uncomprehending. Then she cried out, “I can’t, Meredith! I can’t! I can’t!” And she collapsed, weeping, into Meredith’s arms.
Jim, meanwhile, had wandered off the balcony into the room like a man in a trance. He was walking in aimless circles over the small open space of the floor, obviously in shock. He walked right past Meredith and Nicki as if they weren’t there. He was muttering to himself in confusion.
“How . . . why did . . . they must’ve . . . they must’ve thought . . .”
For a moment, I stood watching him. I was also numb and dazed with shock and horror and grief. But then my anger came back—it came back with a vengeance. Before I could stop myself, I rushed into the room and planted myself in Jim’s wandering path.
“You did this!” I shouted at him. “You told him to go! ‘Go talk to him,’ you said. ‘They’re not monsters.’ You told him!”
Jim came to a standstill. He stood and gaped at me as if he couldn’t comprehend what I was saying. That only made me angrier still. I don’t know what I would’ve done next or what terrible thing I would have said next. My fists were clenched at my sides. Some awful words were about to explode out of me.
“Will!” said Meredith.
I turned to her. She had her arms around Nicki, who was sobbing against her.
“Don’t,” Meredith said. “It’s not his fault.”
“He told Pastor Ron . . . ,” I began to protest.
“Pastor Ron was a grown man who had the courage to do what he thought was right. And what happened isn’t his fault either. We’re surrounded by bad men and they have guns and we don’t and those are just the facts. This—this was coming from the start. There’s nothing we can do but face it as well as we can.”
I tried to take that in, tried to understand the magnitude of what she was saying. But I never had the chance.
Before I could think it through, before I could react at all, the door came flying open and Mendoza came in with four gunmen behind him.
Nicki screamed again and started up out of Meredith’s embrace. She backed away from the intruders in fear. I found myself doing the same—backing away—my feet moving automatically, outside my will. Jim did the same thing. It was useless—there was nowhere to go—but we couldn’t help ourselves.
Only Meredith stayed where she was. Still and erect in the center of the room. Looking at Mendoza, her expression as calm as ever.
Mendoza strode right to her. He stood before her, smiling— smiling cruelly—as if they had played a game to its end and he had won.
Then, all at once, the smile vanished. The rebel leader turned—toward me, I thought at first—but then I realized: no, he was looking at the balcony behind me—staring at the balcony, his mouth a grim line.
“Where is Palmer Dunn?” he asked.
Startled, I turned, looked over my shoulder.
The balcony was empty.
Palmer was gone.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
My heart was so full of fear at that point—I was so sure that Mendoza and his men had come here to execute us—that I seized on Palmer’s escape as a ray of hope. Surely, I told myself, surely he won’t just leave us here like he said he would. Surely he’s going to at least try to come to our rescue. I don’t know what I expected him to do—one man, unarmed, against an army of machine gun–toting rebels. But I guess I couldn’t stand the thought of my own helplessness so I told myself there might yet be something . . . something . . .
Mendoza shoved me aside as he marched quickly to the balcony. He looked over the railing, down at the alley below. I heard him shouting orders to someone down there, some of his gunmen, I guess. A second later he was back in the room. Looking at Meredith again. Smiling at her again.
“Your friend Palmer is not a fool,” he said to her. “Desperate—but not a fool. He sees that your situation has become impossible.”
“Impossible,” said Meredith quietly. “Because, you mean, you’ve murdered a pastor, and now you have to murder the witnesses.”
“Oh, please!” said Nicki. She was backed against the wall. Bent over, clutching her stomach with both hands. Sobbing and sobbing. “Oh, please! Don’t murder us. I won’t tell anyone, I swear. I just want to go home!”
Mendoza ignored her. He strolled back across the room toward Meredith—but before he got to her, Jim stepped up to him.
“Señor Mendoza, I don’t think you understand . . .”
Barely glancing at him, Mendoza drove his elbow into Jim’s belly. Jim gasped and doubled over, clutching himself. I caught hold of him by the shoulder, held him steady. I knew how he felt. The terror of the last few minutes had made me forget my pain, but my head and gut were still throbbing from the beatdown Mendoza had given me. I gave Jim’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze before I let him go. I wasn’t angry at him anymore somehow. There didn’t seem to be any point. We were all in the same fix. And Meredith was right: blaming one another didn’t change anything. The situation wasn’t our fault. It was just our bad luck that we had gotten caught here, that’s all.
Mendoza, meanwhile, confronted Meredith again, standing close to her, completely ignoring the sobbing Nicki over against the wall, who kept saying, “Oh, please! Oh, please! I just want to go home!”
“You had your chance to make friends,” Mendoza said to Meredith.
Meredith’s reaction amazed me. She rolled her eyes and shook her head at him—as if the murderous rebel were nothing more than some kind of annoying child who didn’t know any better.
“Oh, señor,” she said—really, as if he were a child. “You can have whatever . . . friendship you want from me—if you’ll give my companions a car and let them leave this village unharmed.”
“No, Meredith,” I said. The words burst out of me. “Don’t say that. What’re you talking about?”
But Mendoza only sneered at her. “It is all too late,” he told her. “You spit in my eye
, señorita. I do not forgive this. Now you are going to die regretting it.”
“I won’t, you know,” Meredith told him quietly. “Regret it, I mean.”
Mendoza snorted—and I couldn’t tell just then if what he felt for Meredith was hatred or some kind of twisted affection, some kind of twisted admiration. He seemed about to speak again, but he was interrupted by a shout from the alley outside.
The rebel leader pivoted away from Meredith and strode back out onto the balcony. I heard him shouting down to someone below. I heard someone shout back to him.
When Mendoza returned to the room, he said quietly,
“Well, I suppose we must salute the United States Marines. Somehow, your Palmer has reached his van and left the village.”
Whatever small hope I’d had that Palmer was coming to our rescue crashed inside me and went up in smoke. In the same way Jim had thought that the rebels couldn’t kill Pastor Ron, that they would have to listen to reason, I had thought Palmer couldn’t just abandon us to die, that he would have to try to help us. We were both wrong. People can do all sorts of terrible things. They do them, every day. And now Mendoza had murdered our pastor and Palmer had left us to the rebel guns. It was like Meredith said: we were unarmed and surrounded, and there was nothing left for us to do but to have courage and faith and face what came next as best we could.
“He will not get very far, I’m afraid,” Mendoza went on. “Our armies have come out of the mountains in force and we are everywhere. But”—he gave a casual gesture—“however far he gets, it is not going to be of any help to you.”
With that, he turned to the gunmen and gave them an order in Spanish—and then he translated the order into English, because I guess he wanted to make sure we understood— that Meredith especially understood.
“Take them to the wall and execute them,” he said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Do you want to know what it’s like to die? What it’s like, I mean, to know that you’re about to die. To know for certain that the end of your life has come—not someday, but now, right now.
Well, let me tell you, because I know.
Once again, the soldiers started screaming at us, prodding us with their gun barrels, striking at us with their fists. Herding us, in other words, back the way we came, out of the hotel room, down the corridor, to the stairs—down to our place of execution.
It all happened very fast. It was all very violent, very confusing.
But here’s the strange thing: inside my mind, it wasn’t fast or confusing at all. Because something happened to me then—something weird. It was because I knew where we were headed; I knew that I was about to die. And somehow, knowing that made my mind feel detached from my body in some way. Even as the rebel gunmen shouted at us and hit us and forced us out the door of the room into the upstairs hall, I felt very quiet inside and all my thoughts were very clear.
Was I afraid? I guess so. Sure. But not as much as you might think—or, at least, not in the way you might think. You might think that going to be executed was the scariest thing that could ever happen, the real-life version of the last scene in a horror movie, the scene where the kid walks through the basement where the monster is hiding somewhere—you know, that kind of jangling, unbearable suspense as you get closer and closer to the place where it’s going to happen.
But instead, I felt sad. Not just a little sad. I felt this huge, huge sadness. Sure, in church we talk about an eternal life and heaven and all that, but I wasn’t in church now—and I was so, so sorry that this life was coming to an end. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave this world. I didn’t want the new school year to begin without me. I didn’t want to miss all the stupid ordinary things that happen in life: you know, just playing games or messaging your friends or going to the beach or whatever. I wanted to see my parents again. I wanted to grow up and go to college and get a job. I wanted to meet my wife and my children. I wanted to live—I wanted to live so badly. And it made my heart feel heavy as lead to know that I wouldn’t, that everything in this world was over for me now, everything here was finished.
We stumbled down the hall, the gunmen shoving us and striking us and shouting. And my eyes turned hungrily in every direction. I wanted to see everything before it was done. I wanted to drink in every small second of life I still had left.
Everything looked different to me now. Everything looked clearer, much clearer, as if I had been watching the world streaming through a bad wireless connection and suddenly was watching it in hi-def or on Blu-ray. The incredible new clarity made even the littlest things seem kind of beautiful. The hall was just a shabby, dark corridor, the walls chipped, the paint peeling, but somehow it seemed like some kind of work of art. I wanted to slow down to appreciate it. I wanted it to last forever.
And the faces—people’s faces—they all looked so amazing. So clear and beautiful. And everyone seemed different to me than they had before.
Like Nicki, for instance. There was Nicki, stumbling down the hall beside me, barely able to stand she was so afraid, barely able to walk. I saw her sobbing and heard her crying out pitifully again and again, “I want to go home! Please! I just want to go home!” And she wasn’t pretty anymore or glamorous, the way she had been. But she just looked so wonderful, like such a wonderful person. I thought about how happy it always made her to dress up and wear jewelry and put on makeup and about the sweet way she would sit with the little girls in the village and teach them to do their hair. It was as if I realized for the first time how great she was, how perfect, really, the one and only perfect Nicki of the world.
And Jim—I saw Jim. The dazed look on his face as the gunmen shoved and jostled him. I could see what a smart guy he was, and how serious he was about wanting the world to be a better place. I was so, so sorry I had yelled at him back in the room because I could see now how good his heart was. The perfect Jim just like Nicki was the perfect Nicki.
I know it sounds weird, but this is what I saw. This is the way the world seemed to me, now that all the little stuff we think about and care about was over, now that there were only seconds left until I was shot to death.
We stumbled down the hall to the stairway. We stumbled down the steps. The stairwell was narrow, the walls chipped and scarred. I wanted to study it, to see every detail, to hold on to every second. My eyes went on moving everywhere, staring at everything.
But it was over too soon. The rebels forced us down into the corridor below. As I came off the last step, I bumped against Meredith and I looked at her now, looked at her face.
Meredith always looked kind of wonderful to me. I guess the truth, I realized now, was that I sort of had a crush on her. Whenever I was around her, I wished I were older, wished I could get her to pay attention to me—pay attention to me as a guy, instead of just a kid. And now, at the end, she looked even better. She looked like one of those things you see that are too beautiful even to describe, like a sunset or a mountain or something. She had her arm around Nicki’s shoulders. She was holding Nicki up, helping her walk to the place of execution, shielding her as best she could by taking the gunmen’s blows on her own back and arms. As always, she was very straight, her eyes clear, her chin up, even as the rebels pushed and slapped and prodded at her. Her lips were moving and I knew she was praying—praying calmly, full of confidence. She had faith and courage even now.
The rebels shoved us out the cantina’s back door. The next moment I was out in the alley, blinking and squinting in the bright daylight, still looking around me, still trying to take in every moment of life that I had left to live.
I looked up and saw the sky: big black majestic thunderstorms blowing across the last patches of blue. I saw the church bell tower rising nobly against those racing clouds. I saw the balconies of the hotel above, the dust of the alley swirling up below my feet, all of it clearer than anything I had ever seen before. All of it somehow beautiful.
Shouting, the rebel gunmen marched us toward the alley’s end??
?to the same place where they had taken Pastor Ron.
My sadness grew heavier as the end came closer. It was like a great heavy weight inside me that I had to drag along. But even so, in my mind, there was still all that clarity and beauty and perfection, and the strange bright eagerness to live every second until all the seconds were gone.
I looked around me as we approached the end of the alley—and here is one last amazing thing I saw.
I saw the gunmen. I saw the faces of the gunmen. And I know this might sound like the weirdest thing of all—I know you might think they must have looked terrible or that I must have hated them because they were the ones who were about to shoot me. But they didn’t look terrible and I didn’t hate them. I felt sorry for them, kind of. I even liked them a little. I know: bizarre, right? It was as if I could see all their life stories in their eyes. How they had wanted to be heroes and men, real men, and how somehow they had become this instead, these killers, these murderers—like demons almost. It was like I could see that they were trapped forever inside their demon selves. Even now, even yards away from my execution, I was glad I was me and not them.
I faced forward—and my heart went cold inside me. There was the end of the alley. We were only a few more steps away. What had seemed like a long, slow journey inside my mind had in fact been less than a minute, a few seconds of rushing, confused stumbling from the hotel room to this final place.
The gunmen pushed us to the end of the alley and forced us to turn the corner.
“Please! Please! Please!” Nicki kept crying. “Just let me go home! I just want to go home!”
Jim was shouting now as well, his voice hoarse and weak. He was shouting, “Señores! If you would only listen to me for just a second . . . Señores, you don’t understand . . . !”
My eyes moved over them—and past them—and I saw Meredith again, her face calm and luminous, her lips moving silently.