Gutteral, godless, gone

I hesitate to post this, because I can't give it much context. All I can say is that it belongs in the same larger piece as this.


They rode 6 deep in the van; noxious vapors trailing behind their dilapidated conveyance as they shuttled along the canal. The driver, Umberto, was an immigrant with no allegiance to any system but Umberto’s; he was in it for the scant 50 pieces a week it afforded him. Riding shotgun was the nameless elder statesman of the revolutionaries and former chief of the Palanq tribe; his 90 year-old eyes looked out over the dashboard in anticipation. A faded black tattoo snaked up his neck to his ear. Between them Charlie, a scar-faced teenager and former speed junkie, racked the chamber on a Kalashnikov and signaled back to the twins for ammunition. The Ignatio twins, olive-skinned and battle hardened, took a pause from smoking exaggerated “war spliffs” to slide a bandolier across the scratched floor of the van. They snickered in their private language.

G rode in the furthest back seat, olive dungarees rolled up around his knees and a holey white-tank top pulled up around his neck like a Palestinian’s scarf. He rested his arms on the cracked vinyl to either side of him, absorbing some flittering cinematic element, inhaling evanescent blue smoke from the twins along with exhaust, the pungency of guano and the sulfuric miasma of their dying homeland. Today was to be their day, even if it were their last.

G sat up from slouch and took the spliff from the twins, hand-rolled private stock from a shaman who’d carried on the teachings into modern times and died by helicopter gunship for it. It was partially for him that G now carefully loaded the RPG launcher, lined up the indicators and fingered the shoulder-strap into the ready position. Murder was not the sin that They’d committed, for death is an easy thing. But oppression, the malevolent will to power, willful ignorance of the consequences; these were acts to be avenged. The death of Mol’twiki had been the catalyst, the final piece of evidence in the case that his people must fight back or be buried alive next to him. There was a rage at the base of G’s spine that distanced from the cannabis; serving to objectify it and attach strategy.

The van bounced along the rutted gravel road running next to the putrid Kumpuerto Canal. Those still cognizant enough to pull themselves out of their hovel made a living rowing boatloads of ayahuasca and mushrooms 17 miles up the canal to Kumpuerto; a village that once thrived on export of bananas and small plastic components, but now lay a veritable smoldering heap of industrial waste. Umberto slowed the van to allow a spindly legged old man cross, he was swathed in a purple robe befitting a centuries dead ruler of the basin. He looked through the windshield, all the back way to G’s prominence and furrowed-brow leadership. The old man, Ip, had once owned a dime store just north of town; G recalled his kindness to even shoplifting local children. He hobbled across, letting their van pass.

Ip now fished for mutated Boto corpses out of the canal, and piled them up on the side of his dwelling: a crouching hut made from Fed-ex boxes he had obviously fished from the stench as well. G double-checked his weapon. Charlie threw an apple out the window into the dirt where Ip could easily reach it.

G’s attention turned to the twins, that personified duality of hindsight and foresight, who gestured up the road to a white delivery truck careening towards them. The side of it pockmarked with bulletholes, the driver’s door a rusty flap slamming back into the frame with each bump. A passenger in black uniform kicked a local woman out the back doors, her arm breaking as she hit the hard-pack at 35 miles per hour. These were corporate men, heathens from Panama or Texas whose actions were even more despicable then their bosses. These men did not even make fortunes from the exploitation of Kumpuerto, they merely did as they told.
“It starts now!” G yelled, sparking Umberto’s fishtail to align the broadside of the van with the delivery truck’s face. The men inside barely noticed, still laughing imperial hyena laughs at the poor women writhing in the dirt behind them. Charlie popped through a crude hole in the van’s roof, supported by the old chief’s remarkably strong shoulders, and unloaded a spurt of rounds into the windshield of the truck. The men in black uniforms died without so much as a yell.
“Umberto, get that truck back down to the Coves before the copters fly over, Chief take Umberto’s spot. We’re taking this van right up to the gates!”