the Noise Within (2010) (22 page)

Pure luck that Emilio saw him at all, which went a long way to convincing him that fate had finally chosen to turn a smile his way. He woke up to the sour smell of vomit and the sickly smell of urine, all interwoven with the heady smell of sex. The incessant buzzing of a fly drew him back to consciousness. More than one. He tried to raise a hand and swat at them, but his arm was pinned. Something soft but heavy also lay across his crotch and bladder, pressing down uncomfortably on the latter. A leg.

God, he needed a pee. And a drink - his throat was as dry as sand - but the pee came first. The leg belonged to his sister, Juana, younger than him by a year - her leg cocked around him, the mound of her sex hot and moist against his hip - while his arm was pinned beneath the buttocks of his best buddy, Caz. Both of them were as naked as he. Shards of memory came chivying each other in splintered flashes - his sister's sweet face contorted with agony or ecstasy, her eyes screwed tight and teeth gritted as she pushed back fiercely to match the rhythm of his thrusts, rough male hands pumping his cock, the familiar hot searing pleasure-pain of something pushing piston-like in and out of his arse. He rubbed his eyes as if to banish the fractured images. The
Giazyu
which Caz had brought round last night must have been some
seriously
powerful manna, and it had taken all three of them on one hell of a ride. Emilio couldn't remember with any clarity how long they had fucked or how many times or who had done what to whom; all he knew was that his bum felt raw and his prick throbbed, while his head was pounding fit to die.

And he still needed to pee.

Moving as slowly as his bladder would allow, he managed to untangle himself from the assorted legs and body parts, tenderly lifting his sister's thigh to fully free his legs. She mumbled something as he sat up, but she didn't wake.

For a few seconds after he made it to his feet he simply stood there, making sure he could. Daylight streamed in through the cracks in the planking of their clumsily built shelter and he wondered idly what time it was. Tentatively, he moved towards the door, pulling aside the curtain and stumbling outside. Late morning he judged, squinting upward to gauge the sun's position.

After shuffling a few steps away from the doorway, he grabbed his cock and relaxed, allowing his bladder to empty into the weeds and the dirt. This brought such blissful relief that he sighed, closing his eyes until the aching pressure eased.

It was when he opened them again that he first saw the stranger.

The man didn't belong here - you could see that straight away - but at the same time he looked different from the usual
forastcerdos
who thronged to Frysworld the year round - the pampered and gluttonous tourists who were only here to eat, drink, gamble, patronise and fuck as much as they could. After they were sated or had run out of money they would go, feeling good in the face of others' misery and leaving behind everything they'd fucked and abused to sink back into the
pocilga
and again become part of the rich cultural mire of
Paraíso
, the real Frysworld - the place the tourists never saw and never wanted to see.

Yet the stranger was here. Not strolling down the broad streets ogling the local
cabronas
or stuffing his face with 'authentic' native delicacies, but here where he had no right to be, where if he wasn't careful he'd get more of the authentic culture than he ever bargained for.

After he'd stopped peeing, Emilio turned to face this newcomer. He saw that he wasn't the only one watching him. Curious gazes followed the man as he walked confidently, now seeming to head directly towards Emilio.

"Hey, bambino, put that thing away, or are you hoping the sun will make it grow some?" Carla called from across the street.

She seemed the only one paying attention to anything other than the stranger.

"Carla, sweetheart, gimme a minute and I'll come over there so you can feel it and judge for yourself if it's grown any." But his commitment to the banter was half-hearted and his gaze only flickered away from the stranger for a second.

The man moved with a purpose and apparent self-assurance which no
forastcerdo
ought to have here. Pale skinned and muscular, he wore one of the feather-light shirts that were supposed to keep you real cool. Not bad looking either, in a rough, pasty-faced sort of way. No question now, he was making a beeline for Emilio.

The boy assumed he wanted a fuck and was already calculating how much he could take him for.

"You're Emilio."

Mierda!
The
bastardo
knew his name. That put a very different, almost sinister spin on things. For the first time Emilio began to worry. He tried to keep all of this from showing in his voice though, as he said, "Who wants to know?"

Chasing hard on the heels of his initial panic came the realisation that somebody had most likely recommended him to this man as a good lay. After all, why else would a
forastcerdo
be looking for him? The thought caused his best 'come on' smile to spontaneously materialise, lifting both his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth upward, while at the same time the price he had been thinking of demanding went up a few notches.

"Look, kid, I'm not in the mood."

"You sure about that, mister?" Emilio asked.

He stood facing the stranger with hands on hips. This close up the man was far more imposing than he had first seemed; Emilio registered just how well toned his body was, not like the usual flabby
forastcerdos
at all. He pictured this stranger naked and, at the thought, felt his cock starting to stir. Making sure the smile never stopped dancing around his lips, Emilio gyrated his pelvis slowly, provocatively.

From across the way, Carla wolf-whistled.

For his part, the stranger pursed his lips and shook his head as if losing patience. Emilio knew the sort. In denial; not wanting to admit what he had come here for.

Suddenly the stranger moved, so fast that Emilio couldn't even think to react.

He felt a vice-like grip close on the back of his neck and what could only be the barrel of a gun press against his head, just above the ear.
Fuck!
The stranger was behind him.
How had he got there?
Panic blotted out all thought and caused his knees to wilt. If Emilio hadn't squeezed every last drop out of his bladder already, he felt sure he would have wet himself. From what seemed a long way off he heard Carla shout something, but he didn't catch the words.

"Into the hut," a voice hissed in his ear.

The boy half stumbled and was half propelled back to the doorway and through the curtain, his feet scrabbling to prevent him hanging from the stranger's grip like some dangled mannequin.

Coming back in from outside the hut's stink was even worse than it had been when he first woke up. Caz still looked to be out of it, but Juana was beginning to stir - perhaps disturbed by the commotion and Carla's shouting, or perhaps having simply metabolised enough of the
Giazyu
to allow her body to start functioning again.

"What the fu..." Juana began as they burst in. Presumably the sight of her brother dangling from the stranger's fist like some gutted
conejo
hung out to dry must have had her wondering if she'd really woken up at all.

The stranger spoke across her, demanding, "Tell me who this is." The gun barrel jabbed at the side of Emilio's head, causing him to wince and pull away, in as much as he was able to. What if the man's finger twitched? What if the gun went off, even by accident?
It couldn't end like this!

Juana blinked stupidly, as if in the hope that her eyelids could wipe this apparition away. Caz finally showed signs of life, rolling over and groaning.

"Tell me!"

"Tell him, Juana, for fuck's sake!" Emilio heard himself scream. He no longer cared what the stranger was here for, he just wanted that gun away from the side of his head.

Juana presumably concluded this really was happening, or at least that she might as well act as if it were. She stared at him. "Emilio... bro... what's goin' on?"

"Good enough." The pressure of the gun finally lifted, though Emilio would have sworn he could still feel it pressed there even after he saw the weapon waved in Juana's direction. "You two, get out."

Neither Juana nor the still-groggy Caz made a move to go anywhere.

"I said out! Or first I shoot this piece of shit and then the two of you!"

That got through to them. Juana scrambled to her feet and helped the bemused Caz do the same, almost dragging him past them and out the door. Emilio wanted to cry out again, wanted to plead with her not to leave him alone with this maniac, but he was too scared to articulate the need and the fear, too terrorised to form the words, so instead simply screamed them inside his own head.

Then it was just the two of them.

The man threw him down onto the sleeping mats - the same ones that had been vacated by his sister and friend mere seconds ago. At last that crushing hold on his neck was gone and he felt able to think again, to act. Except that the gun was still there, resting on one knee as the stranger squatted in front of him.

"Right, Emilio," the man said slowly, casually, as if they were old friends, "I'm told you're the stud with his ear to the ground and his cock in every club, that you're 'The Man' when it comes to knowing what goes down around here. Am I right?"

"Sure." Emilio forced a grin, recovering a hint of his usual cockiness. "I hear things, everything." At that particular moment he was ready to say whatever the stranger wanted to hear, anything to keep that gun away, but in this instance he didn't need to lie. It was true.

"Good." The man produced something, a sheet of four photos. "You recognise any of these?"

Emilio looked. Four
forastcerdos
but he hadn't seen any of them before. He was tempted to joke that all
forastcerdos
looked the same to him, but thought better of it, both because they didn't and because the stranger did not strike him as the joking kind, so he simply shook his head.

The man grunted. Suddenly money appeared in his hand. Not the local shit printed on paper which could disintegrate if you stared at it for too long, but genuine 'live through a couple of washes' Universal Standards. Maybe the bastard did want to fuck him after all.

"If you should see any of these four, call me, at once. The stranger pulled a tiny comm from his pocket and passed it to Emilio, along with the pictures. "This is preset to my number only. Remember, call immediately at any hour, day or night, if you see them."

"Yeah, yeah, I get it." Emilio's gaze was still transfixed by the money.

"Here's 50 US to make sure you do."

Fifty
? For that much, this
forastcerdo
could have had him for the rest of the day. He reached to take the money, but the stranger didn't let go. "This is just the down-payment. There's twenty times as much again in this once you lead me to one of these four. That's 1,000 Universal Standards." The man spoke each word very precisely, as if Emilio were some kind of simpleton. "Do we have a deal?"

"Hell, yes!" Emilio could hardly believe his luck. This was enough to buy passage off of this God-forsaken dung heap for good. "For 1,000 US I'll find you all four of these
forastcerdos
if they're anywhere on the planet and will even throw in a night or two with my sister as well, if you want her."

The stranger simply stared and then stood up, before heading for the doorway. Emilio didn't care; he was grinning from ear to ear, partly from relief and partly because of the 50 US clasped in his hand. The best thing about it was that he hadn't even needed to bend over and drop his pants to get it.

He grabbed a pair of trousers from the floor and pulled them on before following the stranger outside; mainly because this gave him a pocket in which to stash the money and the pocket comm. No point in advertising his new found good fortune. A small crowd had gathered in front of the shack, some with makeshift clubs and even a knife or two, though Emilio noted that at no point had anyone tried to rush in and save him. They looked like a bunch of people who reckoned they
ought
to be doing something but deep down didn't especially want to. Caz and Juana were there, the former seemed indignant, while Juana just looked vulnerable and scared - she was particularly good at doing 'vulnerable' - earned a living that way. She had somebody's shawl clutched around her in an effort to cover her modesty; as if she had any.

The stranger was facing up to the gathering with a nonchalance that suggested he did this sort of thing every day. He stood there with arms folded and feet firmly planted. In fact, it looked to Emilio as if the man was amused by the whole thing. Emilio put on his best swagger as he left the hut, coming up to stand by the stranger.

"Hey, thanks and everything, but me an' my man here were just talking a little business, is all."

"You sure, kid? He didn't force you?"

Absurd, really; had someone raped him on one of the dingy back streets off Strip, no one would have cared less, they would have snorted and said that it served him right, but because this stranger had dared to enter their world and walk down their streets, suddenly everyone came over all concerned and neighbourly.