The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online Page A

circles at full speed, never getting anywhere. There was so much hatred inside her, so much resentment at the world that had created her. Had she not learned to bury all that rage over the years she probably would have put a gun in her mouth and ended it all. Instead, she stared at her reflection and let the walls come up around her heart, one after another.
    From beside her, she heard a sharp intake of breath, and turned from the window.
    In the seat next to her was an old Hispanic woman, short and fat, her dark complexion indicating her Indio heritage. The woman was gripping the armrests of her seat, her teeth clenched, eyes shut hard.
    Pilar reached over and took the woman’s hand in hers. It was the kind of thing Monica would do.
    Surprised, the woman looked at Pilar.
    Then she smiled.
    â€œThank you,” she said, breathing a little easier now that she had someone to lend her strength.
    â€œTaking off is always the hardest part,” Pilar said in Spanish.
    The woman’s smile brightened. “Oh, are you from San Antonio?”
    â€œYes. Well, years ago. I haven’t been back in a long while.” The lie was practiced. It came easily.
    Speaking Spanish seemed to relax the older woman, for the tension was gone from her face now. She even turned toward Pilar, as though they were sitting on a porch swing together rather than roaring steadily up to altitude.
    â€œAre you going home then?” the woman asked.
    â€œTo your family?”
    Automatically, at the mention of family, Pilar thought of Ramon Medina. It was hard to hold the smile on her face.
    â€œYes,” she said. “I still have some connections there.”
    â€œHow nice,” the woman said.
    She went on talking, that old woman, but Pilar, for the most part, tuned her out. She was nodding politely, offering vague noises of encouragement now and then, but in her mind she’d turned back to darker times. She was thinking uneasy, alone thoughts, the kind of thoughts that kept her awake at night, staring up into the darkness, even when she was playing at being Monica Rivas.
    She remembered a time, twenty years ago now, when she was in the back of an eighteen-wheeler with a boy she knew only as Lupe and fifty-three other migrant workers trying to get across the border into Texas. She had to have been eight, or possibly ten, because she’d been small enough to cower behind a field box that had recently been used to transport onions. She could smell them even now. And Lupe, he would have been younger than that, for she’d been able to shield him with her body when the old woman—an old woman much like the woman sitting next to her now—had gone into cardiac arrest from the heat and died.
    She collapsed right next to them, and when Lupe saw the old woman was dead, her face slack and powdery white in the daylight that slipped through the cracks in the trailer’s walls, he’d gone still. Even after all these years, she could still hear his silence next to her, how awestruck he had been at being closed in with the dead.
    â€œWhy won’t they let us out?” Lupe asked. He huddled against her, trembling, even though it was hot like an oven in the trailer. They hadn’t moved in a long while, and several of the men had kicked and scraped and pushed against the walls, one by one dropping from heatstroke and dehydration. Looking across the silhouetted forms crowded into the trailer, she could tell that most of them were dead already.
    â€œThey’ve probably left us here,” she said. “Disconnected the truck and left us here by the side of the road.”
    â€œBut why? We paid them, didn’t we? We paid them what they wanted.”
    She thought about the frightened look on the truck driver’s face when he opened the back and learned that four of the migrants riding in his trailer had died. She thought about the men surging against the doors when they closed, their screams of rage and