The Devils Highway - Luis Alberto Urrea [56]
With no sweat, your body’s swamp-cooler breaks. The thermostat goes haywire. You are having a core meltdown.
Your temperature redlines—you hit 105, 106, 108 degrees. Your body panics and dilates all blood capillaries near the surface, hoping to flood your skin with blood to cool it off. You blush. Your eyes turn red: blood vessels burst, and later, the tissue of the whites literally cooks until it goes pink, then a well-done crimson.
Your skin gets terribly sensitive. It hurts, it burns. Your nerves flame. Your blood heats under your skin. Clothing feels like sandpaper.
Some walkers at this point strip nude. Originally, BORSTAR rescuers thought this stripping was a delirious panic, an attempt to cool off at the last minute. But often, the clothing was eerily neat, carefully folded and left in nice little piles beside the corpses. They realized that walkers couldn’t stand their nerve-endings being chafed by their clothes. The walkers stripped to get free of the irritation.
Once they’re naked, they’re surely hallucinating. They dig burrows in the soil, apparently thinking they’ll escape the sun. Once underground, of course, they bake like a pig at a luau. Some dive into sand, thinking it’s water, and they swim in it until they pass out. They choke to death, their throats filled with rocks and dirt. Cutters can only assume they think they’re drinking water.
Your muscles, lacking water, feed on themselves. They break down and start to rot. Once rotting in you, they dump rafts of dying cells into your already sludgy bloodstream.
Proteins are peeling off your dying muscles. Chunks of cooked meat are falling out of your organs, to clog your other organs. The system closes down in a series. Your kidneys, your bladder, your heart. They jam shut. Stop. Your brain sparks. Out. You’re gone.
And the men headed deeper into the desert.
PART THREE
IN DESOLATION
10
The Long Walk
SUNDAY, MAY 20—6:00 A.M.
And chaos fell upon them.
Their narratives wander like they wandered, their minds unable to process the details of their torments. The rescuers who came to look for them did not know who they were rescuing. The dead were coordinates on topo maps, identified by GPS numbers. They were all collected in the same general subset of coordinates: they were all within a region bound by N. 32/ W. 113. Some of the bodies of the dead were never identified by name. At best, names were given when the survivors identified them later in the wild free-for-all that followed the rescue operation as everyone fell upon the health center in Yuma. Walkers, corpses, Migra, sheriffs, Marines, pilots, BORSTAR operatives, print reporters, EMTs, ministers, Mexican officials, INS officials, coroners, TV crews, radio personalities, consuls, do-gooders.
To this day, some of the dead are only remembered in Wellton Station as “This poor guy,” “That poor guy there.” The cutters get quiet when they look at the pictures. They just stare at the corpses of the men who died naked.
Walking.
They were deep in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge area. There are several watering spots in the refuge, if Mendez had known where to look. Seven chances to survive. Much would be made of these missed opportunities after the long walk was over.
As the men trudged, their rage grew along with their despair. It was that goddamned Mendez: no, it was this evil desert. No, it was the pinche Mexican government that picked the homeland apart, officials who got fat and rich while they starved. No, it was the Migra, it was the gringos, it was the U.S. government and its racist hatred of good Mexican workingmen just trying to feed their children! They themselves were the fools. The men who talked them into coming, those cabrones, they were the ones. They would get Don Moi for this; they would get El Negro; when they were out of this desert, drinking beer in Phoenix, they were going to put the hurt on Mendez and he would never forget it. Somebody was going to get it! Somebody was going to pay.
Walking.
Desert