/lit/ - Literature

>>14525253

[2/3]

Standing outside are men, clad in black, with machine guns clasped across their ribs. Belts of ammunition hang over their shoulders like a sash. Their cheekbones visible in their faces, severe under the shadow of their berets. A soldier motions to the bus driver through the door, cracks it with the butt of his rifle.

The bus rumbles ahead, streaming past an unending line of soldiers in unmarked fatigues. Shopkeepers shutter their windows, pull their signs in from the sidewalk. The hilltops slip away as house lights are snuffed out by panicked sons and mothers; fathers kill the cherry tips of cigars before abandoning their verandas.

“What’s going on?” I ask Marianna, taking her hand in mine.

“We will be okay,” she says. Whether in truth or delusion, her voice could drown a war drum. “It is unsafe to stop. The bus must keep going. Keep, you know, going on.”

“Who are they outside?”

She pauses, stares into nothing. Desperate for the right words, the right way.

“Policia?” I ask.

“No.”

Marianna leans over the seat and speaks hurried Spanish to a greying man in a bandana seated ahead. He exchanges words with Marianna, and I’m relieved to discern anger in them.

“Militia,” he snaps.

He stares at the men and their guns the way one might stare at undisciplined children. As if they were an ordinary annoyance, like finding a kernel stuck between one’s teeth at dinner, or wetting one’s shirt sleeve under the faucet.

“What?”

“They do not want to do with us, I do not think,” Marianna interjects.

“Look at them—”

“They are,” she searches for the word. “Like politics.”

“I see.”

Pickup trucks with motorized gun turrets mounted to their beds border the roadside, forming a perimeter around the city center, shutting the valves of its heart. One by one the sidestreets and alleys blot out then blacken like organs starved of blood.