Wake: Episode Three… The Alley

By Kai Beasley

“Remember boy, hide a stick among sticks,” Liberio said as he looked at Marcelo with stern affection. “Hide a man among men… now you’re it.”

In hindsight, those moments seemed most strange to Marcelo. Few eight-year-olds learned life lessons from their fathers while playing hide and seek. And few took the game as seriously as Marcelo’s father did. Now, 10 years later, Marcello felt incredibly lucky to have had the experience.

He lay on the beach, soaked. The hot sand burned his forearms. His long curly hair was matted to his scalp, creating a suffocating blanket around his head. The warm sticky air made his jeans and cotton t-shirt feel heavy, and he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to stand under the enormous weight.

He looked back to the water. It no longer provided freedom. Each wave seemed to rise up out of the ocean with the purpose of pulling him back out to sea.

The pain in his shoulder was excruciating. The blood seeped from his wound. He was losing a lot of it. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping him conscious.

There was no sense of time, no sense of place. Marcelo’s world began to resemble a dream, unsure of what was real – unsure if he was even still alive.

His rage over watching his father murdered at the hands of Gen. Grey had subsided, replaced by physical pain, cold, discomfort and, above all, a strong desire to end it all. Thoughts of death came with calm acceptance.

His vision began to blur. Single points of light multiplied and danced around the landscape. Marcelo closed his eyes.

He heard the approach of innocent beachgoers. The sound of their footprints in the sand was soothing. It accompanied what Marcelo hoped would be a calm and uneventful passage into death.

“Hey! Hey, are you alright?” It sounded like the voice of an American tourist. “Honey! Get over here, bring water!”

Marcelo wished the man would shut up.  “No matter what part of the world they’re in, Americans just can’t let things be,” he thought.

“Somebody! Anybody! We need help! Get help!” the tourist continued.

Now there were more footsteps. The steps in the sand created a constant swish. But the sound wasn’t as soothing as before. Reluctantly, Marceo was becoming more conscious. His stomach tightened. The nervous feeling returned. “Shut up!” he thought. “Just shut up and leave me alone!”

A high-pitched sound painfully pierced Marcello’s eardrum. It was a policeman’s whistle. Several officers were converging on his position, drawn to the fairly large crowd that had assembled to attend to the dying young man. Their coarse voices yelled at the crowd to disperse. They had no intention of arresting Marcello and taking him to a precinct. They didn’t care about due process. They didn’t care about the law. They were working for the general, and Marcelo had no intention of finding out what they planned to do to him.

Marcelo could hear his dead father’s voice, “Marcelo… Marcelo… Get Up!”

He awoke quickly, as if startled from a long and refreshing sleep. Though he did not remember how, he soon found himself running into the crowded city.

The whistles had become more frequent. The coarse voices yelling after him, imploring bystanders to, “stop that criminal!”

Now, he was sharp. Awake. Alert. The pain was gone. As he approached the crowded streets of downtown Rio, the ocean at his back, he slowed his pace and put his hands in his pockets. He had to blend in. Hide a man among men; a childhood lesson that he once thought to be the nonsensical ramblings of his father.

With every second, more officers entered the narrow streets, making them more crowded. It wouldn’t be long before they found him if he didn’t do something. 

The whistles came from all directions. The police officers were searching, stopping everyone to get a good look at their faces before pushing them aside as they moved through the crowd, desperate to find Marcelo. Could they see him? Had he been spotted? There was only one way to find out. Marcelo headed straight for one of the officers.

Apparently, the officer didn’t see him approaching until it was too late. With one smooth movement, he lifted the officer’s right arm into the air and bent it backwards about the shoulder, using his free arm as a fulcrum. The man’s shoulder cracked several times before snapping loose, like a chicken wing. The officer screamed in pain as he slumped toward the ground. Marcelo relieved the man of his firearm as the officer continued to roll on the ground as he clenched his useless shoulder.

“There! Bloody shirt! The Bloody Shirt!” another officer exclaimed.

Marcelo felt claustrophobic, as if reality was going to suffocate him in a matter of seconds. He was spotted, and the remaining officers pushed their way through the crowd to get to him.

The crowd was becoming frantic, but not frantic enough for him to make an escape. He needed more chaos to prevent the officers from giving chase. Marcelo raised the gun to the sky and pulled the trigger three times. The shots rang out like thunder. The startled crowd scattered like a heard of angry cattle. The sounds of terror filled the air as men and women attempted to escape the perceived danger. 

The police were overtaken by the disoriented, anxiety filled crowd. Marcelo was now the least of their worries. They had to keep from being trampled by the frantic crowd.

He disappeared into the chaos, running as quickly as his feet would take him, dodging, ducking and shoving all that stood in his way. The paranoia that Marcelo felt was almost debilitating, every face was a potential enemy. Who else was after him? How far would he have to run?

But the pain in his shoulder was beginning to return. He had to slow down. He had to take it easy. The cold feeling was taking over his body once again. He had to keep going. 

“Pull it together.” It was Liberio’s voice again. Marcelo searched in vain for its source, hoping by some miracle to find his father still alive. “Keep it together,” the voice continued. “Nothing can stop you. It’s only a matter of choice.”

For Marcelo, each step felt like his last. His thighs nearly buckled under what felt like the 1,000-pound weight of his body. He reached out, hoping to find a source of support. His hands fell on a cold damp brick wall. It was the wall of an alley to another street.
Escape. Freedom. 

He slowly stumbled down the narrow alleyway, using the wall for support.  He tried to organize his thoughts. Give his mind something to do, anything to occupy it, anything other than thoughts of death.

The light at the end of the alley was blinding. Its intensity made him nauseous. The small passageway was quiet and peaceful, as if it had not been touched by the extreme chaos that took place only a block away.

Marcelo used every ounce of his strength to stand. The muscles in his thighs felt as if they were going to snap at any moment. The sweat from his brow burned his eyes. The heat and loss of blood was taking its toll.

He had to keep moving. It wasn’t his time. He couldn’t stop. There was no time to rest. If he stopped he would be caught and possibly killed like his father.

“Keep it together,” he whispered to himself. “Just keep it together. I just have to keep moving and I’ll be al…”

Before he could finish the sentence he felt the back of his head slam against hard concrete. Everything was turned on its side. It took him a moment to realize that he was in fact lying down, and that the earth had not mysteriously turned itself upside down. He tried to move. He couldn’t. He wasn’t even sure he was still awake. All time stopped. The pain in his shoulder was gone. He no longer felt the hard concrete at his back. He felt light, as if his mind had peacefully left his body.

Then he heard the knocking of dress shoe heels against the concrete. Someone was approaching. Marcelo didn’t have the strength to open his eyes. The light round him dimmed as the figure stood over him. Was it the police? Had one of Grey’s henchmen come to finish the job?

The terror that racked his consciousness only moments before had returned. But he couldn’t run. He couldn’t move. He was at the mercy of who ever found him.

The dim shadow hovered over Marcelo for what seemed like an eternity.

“Shame.” The voice spoke calmly with the slight accent of a Latin American who had been educated in the United States. It was a voice that could only be described as typical. Not particularly high, not particularly low. It was smooth and friendly, almost comforting.

“What would your father think, seeing you laid out like this?” the voice continued. “And how did you manage to get yourself shot? He should have taught you better. I told him that.”

Marcelo could tell that the figure was getting closer as the light around him became dimmer. The shadowy figure placed a hand on Marcelo’s forehead. The hand was smooth, clearly from a moneyed individual far removed from the São Paolo laboring class neighborhood of his youth.

“We’re going to have to clean you up, aren’t we?”

All light and heat from the outside faded away. There was only cold. Darkness. Silence.