FICTION BY HERNAN SALVAREZZA

Hernán Salvarezza is a system administrator and sales solution architect by day. He writes stories and reads the slush pile for a small press and an online magazine by night. He enjoys reading across genres such as horror, sci-fi, mystery, and noir. He has been published by Crimeucopia Boomshakalaking!, Altair Publishers Australia in The Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Volume 2 and 38 Caliber/Plentzia.

WAR-TORN LOVE
by Hernán Salvarezza

The text message from Axel led me to this old road in Punta Escarpada, in the part of Argentina known as Ushuaia. What was Axel doing in this desolate expanse, two and a half hours from the hotel? And more important, why did he insist that I join him here?

As soon as the barn—which was described in the text message—loomed up ahead in the moonlight, I parked by the side of the road and rolled down the window. A putrid smell of decay assaulted me, so I immediately rolled the window back up. It was too late; the stink was in the car and I suspected it would stick to my clothes.

Under the high beams of the Jeep, I saw a scorched patch of soil leading to a burned-out gate. Darkness had eaten the rest of the world. Occasionally I heard the screeching of an owl and saw the silhouette of bats as they darted around the old building.

I snuffed the Jeep’s lights, shifted into first gear, and approached the burned-wood gate. I must have set off a motion detection device because suddenly a bright light engulfed the barn, the road, and the Jeep with me inside. I shaded my eyes, and the world spun around me. That bottle of Jack Daniels that I drank was affecting me more than I expected.

When the spotlight that was blinding me went off, I saw a red spot in front of my eyes but nothing else. I had to get re-used to the darkness. I blinked until my eyes adapted again and that was when I saw the land ending next to the barn: the Punta Escarpada cliff. The dangerous drop-off was but twenty yards away—a void of pitch-black space engulfed by the ocean beyond.

Maybe I needed more Jack. I pulled the flask of whiskey out of the glove compartment and took a swig, my vertigo gone by then. Jack giveth and Jack taketh away.

What was left of the gate was open, so I slowly inched my Jeep forward. The scene beyond the gate was revealed in front of my windshield.

Toward the cliff, I saw four slaughtered cows piled up, one on top of the other. That must have been the source of the stench of rotten meat that now reeked inside the car. I regurgitated the whiskey but didn’t throw up. Still, it left a burning sensation in my esophagus and a nasty taste in my mouth, even more than what was usually there. The damn British had taken away a large part of my health with their chemical weapons in the Falkland Islands.  

Drunk and angry, I grabbed my cell phone and tried to call Axel again, but he still didn’t take the call. Why was he sending me text messages instead of answering? Why didn’t he call when he was so used to keeping me hooked to the phone, listening to him for hours? Maybe he was still too upset to talk to me.

I reached the gate and stopped. A light came on again, but this time it shined in a different direction and wasn’t fixed on me. It lighted the path in front of the barn, where someone was now approaching the Jeep: a big bear of a man, about six-and-a-half feet tall, with an oval head that to me, looked as big as a watermelon. His strange features reminded me of a British officer I had met during the war, but that couldn’t be possible…and the memory made me drink the rest of the whiskey.

The tall man approached the gate, stopped, looked at me with what seemed to be a spark of danger, and slowly tilted his watermelon head to the left. What was this guy doing here, and where was Axel?

I couldn’t help but relive our fight at the hotel: Axel had left a week ago, fed up with my drunken temperament—even though it had been his idea to put us in a hotel with an open bar, despite knowing my weakness—and my harsh comebacks and responses, exacerbated by my drinking, to his complaints. I didn’t blame him. I became a real son of a bitch when my paintings weren’t selling, and getting upset so as not to feel like a loser, had already become my default behavior. But no matter how much of a beast I turned into, I believed he couldn’t live without me. Thank God something had led him to text me. He surely wanted to make up.

While I watched his every move, Watermelon Head plodded in front of the Jeep’s headlights, dragging a leg like someone had broken it and hadn’t healed properly. He knocked on my window and opened his mouth but didn’t speak.

Instead, he growled, which reminded me of a wild boar. Even his features resembled swine: he had a snub nose and bloodshot, lidless eyes protruding from a face deformed by deep cuts and poorly-healed scars. That rotten physiognomy made my stomach churn; it reminded me of the Falklands War and of all those young people that I had slaughtered for absolutely nothing.

Watermelon Head was making me uncomfortable, so I tried rolling down the window to talk to him. But I was so drunk that I kept grabbing at the handle without being able to hold on to it long enough to use it. I only managed to lower the glass half-way.

Finally, I spoke to him through the half-open window. “Have you seen a dark-skinned man with freckles who is about my age?”

But Watermelon Head didn’t answer me. He kept watching me and grunting under those horrible scars that bulged on his cheeks. After a few minutes, I was angry again and pushed the car door open. Watermelon Head got out of the way and I exited the Jeep.

“You didn’t answer me,” I told him, pointing at the barn. “Is my husband in there?” I pointed a trembling finger at the barn. “Have you seen him?”

Watermelon Head nodded.

“You mute or something?” I asked. The moon hid behind clouds. Beyond some cedar trees, a rusty tractor, a Ford F-100, a freezer, and a combine were stuck in the mud.

Watermelon Head just stood there.

“Whatever, dude.” I plodded through the mud to the rear of the Jeep, popped the trunk, and took out the torque wrench. Axel had forced me to leave my service revolver at home before our honeymoon.

Watermelon Head studied my every move as if what I did made no sense. I looked back at him. Two thick scars snaked from his shoulders to his biceps.

He pointed to the barn and strode toward it. Clutching the torque wrench tightly, I followed as the mud tried to suck my shoes into it. We reached the barn door and I hesitated, but the whiskey gave me courage, real or not.

I stepped inside.

I stopped next to some hay bales. In the background, a semi-transparent plastic curtain hung from a wooden beam. I saw two gasoline cans, an emergency flares kit, a few cell phones, a collection of wristwatches, and a pile of clothes of different brands and sizes scattered about on the floor.

The light went out, and darkness engulfed the barn until two timid flames cast a light upon the curtain. The candle flames burned blue and tiny. For some reason, he had lit those candles instead of turning the light on.

“Hey, man,” I said. “We need more light.”

I reached into my pocket for my cell phone and used the flashlight app. That was when I saw something move behind the plastic curtain.

Watermelon Head ripped the plastic barrier open so vigorously that the curtain fell to the floor with a clatter of attached metal rings. I shined my phone ahead and saw a huge painting that occupied the entire surface of the barn’s back wall.

I approached it slowly, grasping my torque wrench as a weapon. I squinted in the dim light of my phone and saw that the canvas contained protuberances: lumps that looked like knees, elbows, and heels poking out through the red paint. I stepped forward and held the torque wrench up to protect my face. I had the impression that those lumps were moving and that they could jump on me at any moment.

My heart skipped a beat when I realized that one of the lumps had a tattoo. It looked like the one Axel had on his right ankle. I reached out to touch it—I was convinced it was a sketch of the Falklands, just like Axel’s tattoo, but no, it couldn’t be—and then suddenly Watermelon Head pushed me against the painting. I felt like I was falling into it. And those lumps that looked like elbows and knees became hands and legs that grabbed me and didn’t let me escape from the canvas.

I screamed and fought against the clasping hands and hugging legs, experiencing a sharp fear that pierced the fog of the Jack Daniels. My panic gave me an unnatural strength, and so I managed to break a few fingers with the torque wrench, but two other hands grabbed my throat. I choked but continued to fight, raising my arm to strike the painting with the wrench.

Suddenly my weapon was grasped out of my grip and it clattered on the barn floor. The hands that held my neck choked me harder, but I jerked out of their clutches and gasped for air. As soon as my mouth opened, the paint from the red canvas filled it and I tasted pennies and I knew: there was no red paint; the pigment was blood.

The hands reached for my arms and two made contact, pulling me forward back into the canvas. I tried to shake myself off the painting again, but I wasn’t strong enough, and this time, the arms and legs that held me wouldn’t loosen their grip. When I felt that that painting’s blood mix with mine, it felt like a movie made of memories exploded in my mind…memories that were not mine, but in which I, and even Axel, were present.

*****

In my previous life, my name was Daniel, and my comrades called me El Salteño because I originated from Salto, Uruguay. I knew my fellow soldiers despised me, but I was not in this war to win a popularity contest.

During my in basic training, all the other men bonded with each other, but they shunned me. I was the punch-line of everyone’s jokes. Most in my squad believed that sooner or later, some British soldier would shoot me because I was often drunk on duty. I knew that no one could understand how I had passed the military aptitude exam or survived the induction process. Even I wondered sometimes.

The training had no effect on me. I suspected the military bosses had taken me because of my skills with the rifle—I was very, very good with the rifle. Even with that, I knew I wasn’t getting out of the conflict alive because I spent my days drunkenly fantasizing about Marcos instead of keeping watch. But I didn’t care if I lived or died because Marcos loved Axel, not me.

During a dreadfully cold night, the British came down the hill my unit guarding and massacred most of my fellow warriors. I ran out of ammunition and knew this was it.

Suddenly Marcos gave me his sniper rifle and asked me to cover him while he and Axel replenished their ammunition. In the frenzy of the battle, I killed several British soldiers, and after a while, I ran out of bullets again. I looked for Marcos and Axel and realized they had left me alone at the front. Instead of reloading ammunition, as they had told me, they took off and left me to my fate. Marcos didn’t give me his sniper rifle for me to shoot while he reloaded. He gave it to me to fool me into thinking he was coming back.

Before long, the British soldiers that had attacked us captured me. For the next few months, every morning, I woke up to the sound of machine gun fire. The British made me march across the desolate plain, barefoot and naked, at gunpoint. They shot at the ground near my feet to make my “dance” and laughed out loud. When they got bored, they took me to a trench far from the battlefront and hit my face with the butts of their rifles.

War crimes were committed.

But the torture didn’t end there. At the end of the march, always at gunpoint, they cut me open and left me to bleed to death. I was about to let go, but then the wind brought a wave of heat that revived me. A strange vitality took hold of me.

I raised my head and immediately tilted it: an orb of white light floated before me and blinded me. But the light soon fragmented and spread across the ground. I saw how, from the same mud, a body grew, made up of the remains of the fallen. The light sewed the legs to the hips, the arms to the torso, and the head to the neck.

I became a being made out of mud.

My eyes, blood-shot and each of a different color, began to shine. The white glare spread until it overwhelmed me. It got into every one of my pores and made me swell as if the bright orb were liquid. I felt it inside me, reconfiguring my flesh. I shook as if having a seizure, my restraints gave way, and I fell to my knees. The agony did not subside, and in that pain, I heard a voice tell me, “To live, you have to choose.”

I saw my reflection in a puddle. It looked so natural to see myself in a puddle of mud. And then I realized it was not me I saw in that puddle; it was Marcos. I had somehow reincarnated into Marcos.

In the reflection, behind me was my hometown. I saw myself as Marcos, painting a canvas with blood and human remains in a barn in Uruguay or Argentina; maybe it was the barn I had inherited from my parents. The barn I hadn’t set foot in since their death.

When I woke up from that hallucination, whether hours or days later, I couldn’t say. I only knew that I was alive and looked human on the outside, albeit a different one, and my previous life was over.

*****

The arms and legs that had trapped me suddenly released me. They drowned back into the canvas again. Absorbed by the blood, they disappeared as if they had never been there. Stunned, I took a few steps back and fell to my knees. But I quickly stood up when I saw Watermelon Head approaching me with a short-handled sickle. I was scared, more than anything, because I realized the Watermelon Head was no stranger. His features resembled someone I knew…but at first, I couldn’t decide who because of the scars on his face.

Watermelon Head’s eyes, nose, lips, and ears slowly slid around his face as if they were melting into someone else. Then his features finally shifted into the appearance of Daniel, the man to whom we sacrificed to escape the war alive. The man I once was.

Daniel yanked me up, put the sickle in my open palm and closed my hand. He growled and guided the sickle, my hand, to his throat. He wanted me to kill him, and although I wanted to decapitate him at any cost, I still needed him alive.

“My husband,” I told him, sobbing. “Where is Axel?”

Daniel squeezed my forearm and growled again as if saying, “Kill me, you fool,” and I shook my head. He squeezed my wrist so hard that I dropped the sickle.

“I won’t release you from life until you reunite me with Axel,” I told him. “I’m sorry we left you. We were kids, seventeen-year-old kids playing at being soldiers. I wanted to live. I wanted to live with Axel, and leaving you there was the only thing I could think of to escape alive.”

Daniel pointed out the painting to me. I looked at the blood flowing inside the canvas but didn’t understand what he wanted. I didn’t understand almost anything anymore except the anger that swelled inside my chest.

Suddenly, everything started to spin for me.

“What do you want me to do?” I pleaded. “What?”

A hard rain started tapping the barn’s roof. The owl from before made it in and landed on a wood beam near the top of the painting; it screeched at me like a harbinger of death, maybe because it knew what was about to happen—perhaps because it was inevitable.

Daniel put his hand into the painting, and the blood swirled around him. The heads, arms, legs, and torsos of the people that Daniel had killed to complete his work of art came up to the surface of the painting.

I realized that all the gasoline cans, flares, clothes, watches, and cell phones I found lying on the floor when I entered the barn belonged to the people Daniel had lured in—people who had previously tried to destroy the painting and failed.

In the center of the painting, in that orgy of living and dead flesh, what was left of Axel surfaced: first, his bloody face with dilated black pupils appeared, and finally, his armless torso and hips without legs. He opened his mouth of chattering teeth as if he wanted to tell me something. An agonizing sob came from deep inside his throat. It broke my heart.

“Marcos...” the voice, barely recognizable, was a chilling throat-cancer patient whisper. “Kill me...release us all. Destroy the painting.”

My anger eclipsed my fears: I lifted the sickle from the floor and stabbed my forever love in the belly and tore his guts out. He crouched, and when he tried to contain his intestines, I kept slashing at the back of his neck, God knows how many more times. I only knew I kept going until his head fell to the ground and rolled at my feet.

My hands were shaking. I could feel the heat in my chest and face. In front of me, the blood in the painting gathered at the center of the canvas—like a hungry animal aware of what was happening—and I knew the painting would not be easily destroyed. It would defend itself. A wave of viscous blood, filled with the liquefied remains of the victim’s corpses, gushed from the painting. It grabbed my arms, legs, and torso and pulled me in, inch by inch, into the frame.

I crouched, grabbed the sickle, and started slashing at the blood, cutting through the layers of connective tissue, flesh, and skin of the bodies in it, and hacking through it until it receded a few feet.

But the wave, six feet tall now, reunited again with itself and washed over me. It took me down and pinned me to the floor. I lost the sickle, and this time, the blood wave kept flowing, wave after wave of blood and human remains, falling on me, choking me with liquefied flesh and skin. 

Pinned down, I covered my face with one of my arms. With my other arm, I reached out and grabbed one of the flares from the emergency kit.

Could fire hurt it? Oh please, I prayed, please be yes. Because at this point, I had no other options. I lit the flare and stabbed the wave several times until it pulled back.

I jerked out of the blood-wave and rolled out of its grasp. I stood and held up the flare, tracing an arch of fire and light and cutting through the darkness. I could see the painting’s blood reshaping, taking another configuration, shifting through and showing the faces of its victims, expanding beyond its frame, and crawling through the barn’s walls and roof.

Waves of blood fell on me, now coming from all sides.

I dodged the waves and picked up a can of gas, a new flare, and a piece of rag from the victim’s clothing lying around. I thrust the rag into the gasoline can’s mouth, lit it with the flare, and threw it at the painting.

The explosion burned most of the blood, creating a hissing, wet sound. The barn was filled with a noxious smell, like some sort of slaughterhouse. The painting was engulfed by flames and suddenly it made sounds resembling the squealing of a thousand dying pigs.

The fire grew, and the painting crumbled, spitting its last scraps of legs, hands, arms, and heads into a mass of skin, flesh, and bones.

The fire traveled from the painting. It lit up the hay bales and walls, and waves of fire took the roof. It closed in on me, engulfing everything in its path. Pieces of flaming wood fell around me. I dodged the falling boards and beams and made it out of the barn. Breathless, I stood gazing at the fire, thinking about Axel, by then charred beyond recognition.

It was over.

The fire kept rising until it lit the night sky. The moon moved past a black cloud. In dark contemplation, my sorrow broke my heart again. Among the smoldering wood, something—or someone—moved, but I didn’t wait to see who or what it was. This time I walked away.