Chapter 4
~§~
“Sam.”
“Mmm.” Clark snuggled deeper into the warm hollow created by his large body in the too-lumpy mattress.
“Sam, c’mon,” the persistent voice hissed. It sounded suspiciously close to his ear.
“Wha?” he muttered, opening one eye just enough to notice the paling sky beyond the torn screen of the window right above his pallet. The crack of dawn, it was. No, not even that. Before the crack of dawn.
One of the benefits of living in the middle of nowhere with people who had no plans of going anywhere anytime soon was the luxury of timelessness. He hadn’t glanced at a watch in weeks, letting the turning of the earth guide his waking and sleeping. And he could tell already that the earth hadn’t turned far enough for him to be awake yet.
Rolling his head away from the wall, he opened the other eye to find Gillian bending over him, her finger poised to inflict a physical bit of incentive. “You gotta get up.”
“Why?” he grumbled, then noticed a slightly panicked look in the gray eyes peering at him through the pre-dawn dimness. “What’s wrong?”
Satisfied that she had his attention, she moved to the chair where he’d dumped his shirt and pants before falling into bed the night before. She scooped them up and held them out to him as she explained. “Henriqué spotted a FARC convoy headed this way. We’ve gotta leave before they get here.”
The mention of guerilla soldiers worked better than a bucket of ice water to bring him to full alertness. Swinging his legs over the bed to sitting, he kept the striped blanket draped over his boxers. Her eyes widened at the site of his bare chest, and she glanced away quickly, although he couldn’t be sure if it was embarrassment or nervousness.
“But you’re Red Cross,” he said, trying to understand the reason for her apparent panic. “I thought that meant – ”
She didn’t give him a chance to finish, knowing what he thought. “Yeah, you’d think. But I guess the FARC isn’t quite up to speed on the articles of the Geneva Convention. Even if they were, I don’t think they believe it applies to them so much. Here.” She thrust the clothes in his direction again, more insistent as she glanced toward the door.
Raking a hand through his hair, he yawned as he accepted his pants and shirt. She still didn’t get it. What he was capable of doing. That he’d made a career out of saving people. Protecting people. That he was bullet proof. “Gillian, you don’t understand. I can stop them.”
With a vertical twirl of his finger, he motioned for her to turn around, and after a startled blink, she quickly complied. Assured that she couldn’t see anything they both might regret, he stood and began to dress. He didn’t bother spinning. He never bothered spinning anymore. Part of the whole timelessness thing.
“There are something like 15,000 men in the FARC army,” Gillian said over her shoulder. “You gonna round up all of them? Besides, unless you’re planning on building yourself a cozy little hacienda and sticking around for a good long time, they’d just come back after you’re gone. And believe me, they’d punish the villagers a hundred fold for anything you do to stop them today.”
Her dire prediction stopped him cold, his fingers frozen on the button he’d been about to shove through the button hole. “So what will they do? The villagers, I mean.”
Not checking to see if he was decent, or maybe just not caring, she turned around to face him with a shrug. “Lay low. Stay inside their homes. If the soldiers stop, they’ll give them some food. Any money they have.”
Clark glanced around the room, his eyes landing on the low trunk now housing his Superman suit and the Clark clothes he’d never worn. He strode to it purposefully. “I have some money.”
Thrusting his hand into the pocket of his folded khakis, he pulled out about a hundred dollars worth in twenties and turned with them clutched in his fist. Not much, but in Colombia, a fortune. “Here. Take this.”
She stared at the wad of green bills, her expression softening considerably. “That is so...incredibly generous, Sam. But those are US dollars.”
“So? I thought they liked US money?” he said, confused. From his travels, he knew well how much US currency was valued, especially in underdeveloped nations with thriving black markets.
“People around here don’t usually carry around twenty dollar bills,” she pointed out, then continued when he looked at her with a frown. “If those soldiers see US money, they’ll want to know where it came from. And they’ll do anything it takes until they find out.”
Clark felt his heart sink. Once again, Superman was of no use in this place. And now even his superficial value as an American could do these people no good. In fact, his very existence could cause the village more grief.
Gillian didn’t give him any time to ponder the irony of the situation, heading for the door. “C’mon, Sam. We’ve gotta go.”
He snatched up his Tevas sandals and followed her down the path to the main road. They were half way through the village before he had the presence of mind to ask her where exactly where they were going.
“Underneath Roberto’s store is a sótano...a cellar, of sorts,” she explained, slightly breathless from running up the hill. “Of course, it’s going to be a little harder to get to since the quake buried it. But it’s all we’ve got.”
“I still don’t understand why we have to hide.”
“Because I don’t have brown eyes, and you don’t look Colombian,” she said grimly. “We’re perfect targets for a kidnap for ransom.”
He was very familiar with that scenario, a story of a kidnap for ransom victim appearing in the Planet’s international section almost weekly. But never in his wildest thoughts would he have imagined himself in danger of such a horrific practice.
They reached Roberto’s store where Roberto himself was digging beneath the remaining rubble with one hand, a small oil lamp held high in his other. Clark stepped in to take over, and in no time, a wooden trap door thickly coated with grey dust came into view.
By then, several other men had appeared on the scene, and they quickly discussed how the trap door could be reconcealed once Gillian and Clark had disappeared down into the cellar. Clark positioned a sizeable chunk of adobe next to the door, it being an easy enough feat for two or three men to roll it on top of the wooden planks. They would toss on additional debris to camouflage it further, and when the danger had passed, Clark would be able to force his way out with minimal effort.
Gillian wasted no time scampering down into the dark, damp hole. But Clark hesitated. He had no real fear of small places, but something about the cellar reminded him of a grave. After Roberto handed the oil lamp down to Gillian’s waiting hand, Clark felt a little better when he could see the small flame dancing away the pressing darkness, and he jumped down to land beside her.
Once in the cellar, it didn’t seem quite as morbid as he’d imagined. Although he almost had to stoop to keep from brushing the ceiling with the top of his head, the room itself stretched bigger than his own shack. The walls and floor were tightly packed dirt, cool to the touch, and the whole room smelled very much of wet soil and roots.
The wall farthest from the trap door was lined with shelves, dusty jars and rusting tin cans stacked haphazardly along its length. In the darkness, Clark couldn’t tell what the jars and cans contained, and he wondered if any of it was edible. He hadn’t had breakfast yet.
In another corner was a wooden box with a loose lid, and Gillian went to it as the men above them slid the trap door back into place. Clark sucked in his breath, trying to still the sudden thudding of his heart. Why was he finding it so hard to remember that he didn’t have to hide his abilities, and if necessary he could just tunnel his way out of the earthen chamber?
He glanced at Gillian to see if she were suffering from any of the same claustrophobic tendencies, but her attention was inside the box. From its innards she extracted another oil lamp, a thick woolen blanket, and a deck of playing cards. Obviously this wasn’t the first time this cellar had been used to house humans.
And when she spread the blanket over the floor, plopped down upon it and started shuffling the cards, it became clear that it certainly wasn’t the first time Gillian had spent time in hiding. The panic had left her gray eyes, her manner relaxed if not downright convivial. Torn between admiration for her calm acceptance of the situation and horror that she accepted it so calmly, he stared down at her.
“Does this happen a lot?” Clark asked.
“Depends on what you mean by a lot,” she stated matter-of-factly. “Before the quake, it’d happen about once a month or so. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. After the quake I think everyone was so caught up in just surviving that even the guerillas stayed put.”
“And every time they show up, you come running to hide out in this cellar?”
She thought a minute. “I suppose I could stay outside and take my chances. But I wouldn’t put my parents through that.”
He could easily imagine what she meant, but some perverse part of him asked the question anyway. “Put them through what?”
“My kidnapping. Being told they had to cough up a few million dollars if they ever wanted to see their daughter alive again. Maybe having a tape sent to them showing what I was suffering just to give them a little incentive to make it snappy.”
Clark gaped at her, her detached observation shocking. “You’re not worried about what would actually happen to you?”
“Sam, if I thought about what could happen to me out here, I’d go loco. When you decide to hang around the wilds of Colombia, you gotta expect a little danger.” She started to deal two piles of cards. “Why don’t you sit down and play some cards. You any good at poker?”
Wordlessly, he sank to the floor, trying to digest the casualness with which she accepted the danger inherent around her. It made him shudder, an icy coldness racing through his blood at the thought of Gillian in the hands of those who would harm her just to get her parents to pay huge amounts of money. Although he’d felt compassion for the victims and their families, the stories he’d read about kidnaps for ransom had always involved faceless people.
Gillian had the grayest eyes he’d ever seen, a quick, bright smile, and a long, honey colored braid running down her back. She had a face.
Whether she could sense his continued nervousness and wanted to soothe him, or perhaps because she just liked to hear herself speak, Gillian gave him a brief history of the FARC while they alternated between seven-card-stud and Texas Hold’em. He already knew quite a bit about the guerilla groups and their origins, as well as the drug cartels and their stranglehold on the Colombian government, but he’d never imagined how the whole mess affected tiny towns like San Pablo.
“A lot of subsistence farmers are forced by the guerillas to grow coca plants on their land,” she explained, munching on a large green olive pulled from the jar she’d selected off the shelf. “They’re allowed to plant only enough food to get them through the year, but the rest of their crops have to be coca and they have to give the money it makes to the FARC. Kind of a medieval extortion.”
Clark shook his head sadly, helping himself to another olive. It made an odd breakfast, but he enjoyed the unique flavor on his tongue all the same. He’d felt some additional relief to know that there was edible food in the dark cellar should their stay become extended. “And the government can’t do anything about it?”
“What are they going to do? Most of these towns are so remote, there aren’t even roads leading to them.” She snorted derisively. “Besides, some of the thugs hired by the Colombian government are more feared than the guerillas themselves. I’ve heard horror stories about what these paramilitaries have done to civilians even suspected of sympathizing with any guerilla factions. Torture. Rape. Mass executions.”
“Has anything like that ever happened in San Pablo?” Clark asked, holding his breath. In just the short time he’d been there, these people had come to be his friends.
She shook her head as she gathered up the last hand and started to reshuffle the cards. “Thankfully, San Pablo is too small. There’s not enough farmable land to grow anything substantial.” She chuckled at the irony. “It’s kind of sad, but the very fact that these people are so poor is what keeps them free of interference.”
“So why do the guerillas come here at all?”
“San Pablo is a pass through pit-stop. At least before the quake. Between Roberto’s store and Rosita’s cantina, it’s about the only place they can buy cigarettes or replenish their stock of José Quervo for miles.” She finished shuffling. “So, seems you’re not so good at poker, and since you don’t have any money I can win, how about we switch to gin rummy?”
They played several hands in silence while Clark absorbed what she had told him. Every day he came to see the forces that these people struggled against, both in the physical world and the human world. It amazed him that they had the strength to not only persevere but actually thrive.
And it humbled him, putting his own circumstances into sharp perspective. In his life, food was plenty, the water safe to drink, and hardship was an electrical storm that knocked power out for an hour or an inconsiderate neighbor who hogged the hot water supply. He could walk down the street without fear of being kidnapped. He’d lost his job, but his was a country where jobs were plentiful and there was a government to support him if he found himself on hard times.
“Since we’ve got some time to kill, do you want to tell me about that other job you have? Or maybe had, now that you’ve been gone so long,” Gillian speculated, breaking the silence.
Clark blinked, a shiver running down his neck at the eerie coincidence of her asking such a question just as he'd been thinking of the Planet and his employment situation. That was the second time she’d spoken out loud thoughts that had been running through his brain, and he started to wonder if she had a gift. With a shake of his head, he dismissed the thought. He didn’t believe in stuff like that.
“Nope, I don’t want to tell you about it,” he stated firmly. So far he'd avoided talking about his life as Clark, and he saw no reason to do so now. Instead, he changed the topic, wanting to know more about her. “But I’d love to know how you came to be here.”
“Like I said, I came down here with my father when he was a Doctors Without Borders volunteer. Well, not actually San Pablo. But another town a lot like it.”
He took up the seven cards she’d dealt him and ordered them into sets and runs. Only a pair of fours to start with. Another lousy hand. “So they accept nurses into their program?”
She laughed out loud. “They do if a certain doctor who has some pull with upper level decision makers requests it.”
“I see. Your dad’s a bigwig, then?”
Gillian thought a minute, her lips pursing before she grinned mischievously. “Not so much a bigwig as more like very persistent.”
It was his turn to laugh out loud. “So you were adopted?”
She joined in the laughter, accepting his easy teasing. As they shared their amusement at her expense, Clark felt much of the gloom of the dark cellar disappearing even though the two small oil lights gave little illumination.
When their merriment lessened, she took a deep breath. “Actually, I think my dad was shocked when I told him I wanted to come down here with him.”
“Why’s that?” Clark asked.
“Because when I was sixteen, he used to drag me down to the free clinic where he volunteered once a month. I’d complain for days before we had to go, then every second of the forty-five minute commute to downtown Detroit.” She shook her head, as if she regretted the hell she’d put her long-suffering father through. “I made it like pulling teeth for him.”
Clark had a hard time imagining Gillian complaining about anything. In the last five weeks, he’d seen her accept a lot of discomfort and inconvenience, rolling up her sleeves to do the most menial of jobs. Still, there was a big difference between a grown woman and a teenager, so he gave her the excuse of youth.
“I’d imagine most sixteen-year-olds would rather sleep in on a Saturday than volunteer.”
“No, I took complaining to a new level,” she clarified with a sly grin, not letting her sixteen-year-old self off the hook. “I hated it. The dirty people, the screaming kids, all lined up waiting to see the doctor. The smell. It disgusted me. I once told my father I’d rather work in a gravel pit than spend another minute in that clinic.”
“But you became a nurse?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yep,” she said. “Just goes to show you that miracles really do happen. Gin.”
Gillian laid down her cards, the five, six, seven and eight of clubs joined with the ace of hearts, diamonds and spades to create a winning hand.
“What really happened, to change your mind, I mean?” he asked, very much wanting to know how a sixteen year old who hated being around underprivileged people came to serve as a ICRC volunteer in a Colombian village so poor that it didn’t have running water.
She shuffled the deck absently, as if her mind was traveling back in time. “One Saturday, I was giving my dad even more than the usual grief. My friends had all gone on an overnight trip to Chicago, but I had to stay behind because it was a volunteer weekend. So as you can imagine I was pretty pissed.”
Clark nodded for her to continue, leaning back against the cold wall but oblivious to any discomfort.
“I was sulking in his office when this woman came into the clinic. She’d walked, like, twenty blocks to get there, and it was freezing outside. I remember her coat didn’t have any buttons on it.” Gillian shuddered, as if she herself felt the icy chill. She’d stopped shuffling the cards, holding the deck loosely.
“Come to find out this woman was pregnant, and she was in labor. But the only nurse at the clinic had gone out to get lunch for us. There wasn’t any time to call an ambulance, so my dad made me scrub up so I could help him.
“Man, it was awful. The woman was screaming, there was blood all over the place. I kept asking my dad if we could give her some drugs or something, but he said it was too late for that. It seemed like it took forever but I guess it really didn’t, because all of the sudden this baby was coming out of her. I’d never seen anything like it. A whole person, right there in my dad’s hands. It just blew me away.”
She stared off to a point past his shoulder, and Clark guessed that she was remembering that life-altering moment. He had a few of those himself. Memories that he could recall as if they were still happening. Some of them he held onto tightly. Others, he wished he could erase.
“So you decided to become a nurse,” he concluded when she remained silent, her story apparently finished.
“Yep. Nurse practitioner actually. So I could deliver babies if I wanted to.”
If he remembered correctly, that meant she had advance training and could do some of the things that a doctor could do, which made him wonder. “Why not a doctor?”
Gillian shook herself back into the present. “I thought about it, but then I realized that the nurses are the ones who get to be with the patients. Get to know them and really make a difference. The whole time that lady was having that baby, she held on tight to my hand. Wouldn’t let it go for anything. I think it meant a lot to her that I was there.”
“Did you keep complaining? I mean after that day. About going to the clinic?” he asked.
She smiled and looked down at the cards in her hands. “Yeah, of course. I mean, come on, I was sixteen. What sixteen-year-old would rather work at a walk-in clinic than hang out at the mall with her friends? Still, I didn’t hate it so much after that. The people had stopped being these horrible slackers who should have just gotten jobs. They became real people, with names and stories. Kids and moms and grandpas.”
Looking up, she caught him staring intently, amazed. She flushed. “Yeah, I know. Pretty sappy. What can I say, I’m the original spoiled rich girl turns hippy do-gooder.”
“No, that’s a great story,” he said, meaning it. The kind of story that made wonderful movies and great biographies. He imagined that someday, Gillian’s life story would make a great biography. And she was still so young. Jeff had told him she was only twenty-six.
“Yeah, well, it didn’t end up so great,” she remarked dryly as she started shuffling the deck again.
“Oh yeah?” He leaned forward, wanting to know more. A lot more.
“Turns out the lady was a crack addict, and her baby was born already dependent. He had to be ambulanced to the Detroit Children’s Hospital, but he ended up dying because he was too small and his lungs were underdeveloped. I was crushed when my dad told me what happened to him.”
Clark gaped, depressed that something so wonderful could end so tragically. “That is terrible.”
She was no longer listening, lifting a hand to silence him. “Hey, did you hear that?”
“What?” he said, tensing. Was it possible the guerillas might find the trap door?
“That knocking. Listen again.” They listened for a moment, then Gillian whispered, “Jeff always knocks on the door three times when it’s safe to come up.”
He turned his ear to the ceiling. Although his super-hearing could pick up taps happening on the other side of San Pablo, he knew that Jeff’s would be distinct enough for Gillian’s normal ears to hear.
Suddenly, as clear as a bell, three sharp raps sounded on the wooden door above their heads.
Gillian beamed. “Yep, that’s it. The signal. We’re free.”
As if it had been the most normal way to spend the morning, she bent down to collect the scattered cards, then folded the blanket after shaking the dirt from it. Both of these she tucked back into the box, along with one of the extinguished oil lamps. Replacing the lid, she turned to Clark expectantly.
“OK, Sam the superman, I think this is your cue.”
He stood fully upright, placing his palms flat on the trap door. With a slight heft, the door and its disguise slid away from the entrance, and he blinked against the sudden onslaught of sunlight hitting his light-deprived eyes.
Taking the hands that were thrust down into the hole, he allowed himself to be hoisted to the surface. Before anyone could offer Gillian the same courtesy, Clark turned, extending his own hand down to grasp her wrist firmly. She clasped her hand around his forearm, and he drew her lithe frame out of the darkness.
For some reason that he couldn’t explain, he didn’t let go of her arm right away. Instead, he pulled her in front of him and to the side so that he could place his other hand on the small of her back and guide her down the heap of rubble. He’d seen this woman scramble over piles of adobe ten feet high and bully reluctant horses down steep inclines. Still, he released his grip on her only when they stood firmly on the road.
Judging from the position of the sun in the sky, they’d been hiding well into mid-morning. As Gillian headed toward the temporary clinic and Clark toward the school where they’d begun to clear the site, he realized with a start that for the first time in over a year, he’d gone almost three whole hours without obsessing about Lois Lane.
to be continued...
