The Secret Files of Lucky Ford: The Butcher and the Black Tide, Part 2 of 13

Lucky Ford is lost and on the run in Spain, with strange enemies behind and a masked killer ahead. But is the Gallo Rojo an ally or a jailer?

The Butcher and the Black Tide is now available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

This is Part 2 of The Secret Files of Lucky Ford, Mission 2: The Butcher and the Black Tide. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, check it out before reading any further.

Content Warnings: Violence, Torture, Death, Gore, Human Trafficking, Mild Swearing, Tobacco Use, Creeps

MONDAY MORNING, JULY 12, 1943
AN UNKNOWN VALLEY
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

The air rasped at Lucky's face as he chased after the Gallo Rojo.

It was hot there. The ash clouds smothered everything beneath like a sweaty wool blanket. It reminded Lucky of the HMS Saint George’s engine room, the sweltering oven where the Colonel had briefed him for this mission.

Lucky tried his best to keep up with the Gallo’s the red coat tails, but the things the Colonel had told him about the Romanian and his gruesome legacy in Spain wormed their way into Lucky's thoughts.

“Fifty percent of any victory begins with good intelligence,” the Colonel had advised, so Lucky had read and read while he was aboard, as much as he could. The Office's files on Doctor Dorin Hellbörg were thick and comprehensive and Lucky had pored over every page.

Hellbörg had been born into one of the wealthiest households in his country. He had never needed to work or attend university, so when he went to medical school he did it more out of curiosity than to make a career. His family name made him a target for political recruiters in the late twenties, and the right-wing Legionnaire Movement, the Greenshirts, knew exactly how to handle an entitled scumbag like him. He had never been politically motivated before, but hate was a language he spoke with ease, and he rose quickly through their ranks.

In '37, Hellbörg traveled into the chaos of Spain’s Civil War with Greenshirts leader Ion Moța. They were sent to forge an alliance with Franco's Nationalists, but, despite only arriving as observers, they got caught up and took up arms against the Republicans at Majahonda. When the battle ended, Moța and his second-in-command were dead, and Hellbörg found himself with a fistful of shrapnel chewing its way through his guts. He would die quickly if he were moved, and slowly if he stayed. The surviving Greenshirts gathered their dead and went home, promising the dying doctor they'd remember him as a martyr.

The mutilated surgeon wasn't ready for that honor, but he didn't trust anyone but himself to hold a scalpel, not even on his death bed. He’d never repaired any organ damaged that badly before, but he'd had always considered himself a quick study.

Hellbörg would need practice, and practice would be expensive.

His family fortune had always attracted the greedy and the desperate. A few gold coins passed to a Francoist soldier was enough to secure Hellbörg the use of a Republican prisoner, conveniently suffering the exact same wounds he was.

Hellbörg’s first attempt to repair the injury was unsuccessful, but by the fourth try he’d perfected his methods. Once experienced it took him just twenty minutes to repair his own maimed, infected intestines and stomach, without anesthesia. He was back on his feet in days.

Word of the Romanian's skill spread through Spain, and his services saved the lives of many wealthy Francoist officers. His method of using practice patients continued; scores of conscripts and prisoners were sacrificed to build his talent.

Hellbörg’s reputation crossed the battle lines as well, for every Francoist life he saved cost a half-dozen of the Republicans’. They called him la Medida. It meant ‘the measure,' for they said he followed the age-old rule: 'mide dos veces, corte una.'

‘Measure twice, cut once.’

The inevitable Republican mission to assassinate la Medida depended on a midnight bombing run with a stolen biplane. The winds were strong that night, and their bomb fell twenty yards off-target. The blast would have missed Hellbörg completely had be not been standing next to an ether canister. One sliver of shrapnel tore through the tent and ignited the ether, torching everything and everyone inside.

Miraculously or tragically, Hellbörg would not die. The explosion and ensuing inferno left him maimed and broken beyond what anyone thought survivable, but he kept breathing.

He spent the next two years comatose in a Francoist hospital bed. Despite his doctors' daily predictions, he never expired.

Hellbörg woke to find he'd become a forgotten monster with no country to return to. While he slept, Romania had turned over on itself, overthrowing the Greenshirt regime in a bloody coup. He was stranded in Spain, crippled, alone, and homeless.

Hellbörg's fortune was in a Swiss bank, and he was eventually able to access it using patterns of blinks and grunts. He laid out complex instructions, designing prostheses from scratch and laying out surgical plans step-by-step to repair his body as well as modern medical science allowed. Once he was stabilized, he disappeared for the next three years.

The Colonel had laid open a green folder in front of Lucky, marked with a snake encircling a radio aerial. Inside, Lucky read an intercepted call for experienced assassins that had originated in southern Spain in May of '43. The Office's HYDRA intercept station in Canada plucked it from the airwaves and forwarded it the Library. When the OCUO researchers there backtracked it, they discovered that the Romanian wasn't the target of the assassins, but their prospective employer.

Office investigators and cataloguers began piecing together the Romanian's recent activities, but with open combat still raging all over the world, the only moves taken against him had been on paper.

Hellbörg leveraged his fortune and military contacts to carve out a parcel of land in the rural south, below the mountains and hidden in forests. His new home was a decommissioned coastal battery that overlooked the Mediterranean side of the Strait of Gibraltar. He paid the local government well to have free reign in this territory.

From his new base of operations, Hellbörg began his pursuit to rebuild his ruined body. Medical techniques to regrow or even transplant lost limbs, skin, and muscle tissue were unheard of, but la Medida was determined to find a way. He would just need some practice.

The Library officials were able to connect Hellbörg to reports of an emptied work camp for political dissidents. There were seventy men unaccounted for from that camp alone. It was unusual, but fighting in Russia and North Africa had taken Office precedence over missing persons in a neutral nation.

A few months later, a nearby mental institution, infamous for brutal living conditions and reports of torture, was discovered deserted. Over a hundred patients, shell-shocked veterans of the Civil War, were gone.

Scattered reports of abductions in small villages began to surface over the next few months, then entire households, just gone. Sightings of ‘phantoms’ and 'bag men' were reported to and ignored by the local authorities Hellbörg kept on generous retainer.

Lucky's experiences, after having been on the ground less than an hour, had confirmed the wildest of these reports. There were ‘bag men,’ and they were working for the Romanian. He was the cause of hundreds of abductions in the last three years. Hundreds of people, never to be seen again.

In June, just a month back, the Bureau for Western European Affairs captured a courier carrying a list of prisoners held by Department Three, bound for Hellbörg's facility. Alongside their names, each prisoner had a rundown of their vitals: height, weight, blood pressure, age, nationality, ethnicity, medical status. Below the vitals was something more ominous: prices.

After a thorough interrogation in the Grave, that courier revealed that the Romanian’s need for practice subjects had outpaced his ability to get them. He was trading gold and his breakthroughs for more prisoners, and the Nazis were all too happy to oblige. It was said that his techniques were near-ready to make him whole again, somehow. They could not say how a handless surgeon could perform such complex operations, but the evidence spoke for itself.

The Office's file on Hellbörg was becoming quite thick, but with the war raging all over the world, a single man in a neutral nation was not high on their priority list. In fact, it might have been years before anyone came after Hellbörg had Lucky not taken Werner von Werner's notes during the escape from Vesuvius.

The intel Lucky’d captured in Vesuvius had tied everything together. Grease and Jonesy had been in the latest shipment of Department Three prisoners sold. Hellbörg would get the chance to develop new techniques on them before re-selling the products of his twisted work to the Nazis once he was done.

The Colonel wouldn't speculate on the specifics of that work, but Lucky knew Department Three's interests all too well: the gremlins, the Vargulf, the Crying Maiden. The krauts were ruthless in their pursuit of neurological and biochemical manipulation, while the Romanian was supposedly unrivaled in his ability with a scalpel and thread, reshaping anatomies at will. Together, they could create monsters like Lucky could not imagine.

Falling cinders stung Lucky's eyes every time he shoved through brush and ducked under branches. He did his best to keep up with the Gallo Rojo. He lost sight of him a couple times in their flight, but then Lucky'd catch a glimpse of a crimson between the shadows. It took all of his concentration to avoid running into trees or falling into soot-choked stream beds, but as he ran his mind cleared and he remembered what the Colonel had told him aboard the Saint George:

“Most new officials enroll in the Bellegarde School to complete mandatory training before they're allowed into the field.”

The Colonel’s face had been lit red by the air raid lights in the Saint George's engine room. It was the only place in the Bureau for African and Mediterranean Affairs' mobile headquarters that they might be able to conspire. Chief Engineer Seward had found this time convenient for his crew to all visit the mess hall, so Lucky and the Colonel were alone.

“You are one of very few of our number who were introduced into our combat ranks through field recruitment rather than through formal Office training,” the Colonel said as he tamped the tobacco in his pipe.

Lucky recalled from Miller's impromptu history lesson about the Office a couple days before that the Bellegarde School was what the officials called the Bureau for Recruitment and Training and was headquartered in Ontario, at a facility known as Camp X.

“If your experiences in Vesuvius weren't a trial by fire in the more severe sense of the term, I would be at a loss to define such a phrase,” he continued. “Lad, you've already displayed the most important trait for any official: a genuine acceptance of the reality before you. You take in and react without pause to your present circumstances, no matter how absurd or impossible they seem. This is something that can never be taught in any classroom, something that some of the officials who've been with us since the beginning still have trouble doing.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lucky said quietly. He knew that if he hadn't been able to adapt to everything he'd already faced, he wouldn't’ve been around to have this conversation.

“What is it you Yanks say? You 'roll with the punches,'” the old soldier said. He took a moment to put a match to his pipe, puffing away until the cherry glowed to life. When it was fully lit he pulled it away from his lips, like he was surprised by an unfamiliar taste. It took him a second to remember that he'd lost his usual pipe during the raid on Vesuvius.

“You know that Churchill and Roosevelt have called for a two week ceasefire on the Italian peninsula in the wake of the eruption, yes? Hitler has accepted, in order to ‘engage in the rescue and rebuilding of Naples,’ but you and I both know that the Jerries are just creating an excuse to fortify unmolested against the inevitable invasion,” he said. Lucky nodded.

If all had gone to plan, Italy would have been under total Allied control by September. The Allies had been days away from taking Sicily, and Italian forces on the boot had started to mutiny against Nazi command. Popular opinion had been moving toward violent revolution against Mussolini's fascist government.

That was before the eruption.

New reports coming in said that the Italian people were indeed arming for combat, but now against Allied forces. The Germans' prepared propaganda campaign blaming Allied bombing for Vesuvius was working, strengthening the bond between the Italian people and the Nazis more than ever. The two Axis powers were presenting the most united front the Allies had seen since the Pact of Iron in ‘39. German and Italian forces had been allowed to retreat from Sicily unbothered, but it was damn certain that they were only returning to the peninsula to make a bulwark against what was now a shockingly obvious full-scale Allied invasion. With proper support and preparation in the mountains of Italy, the Axis could hold out for years against the most dedicated assault.

“I cannot leave the ship, Lucky. There is too much to prepare for and too many officials in our Bureau have been lost or wounded,” the Colonel said. He took a deep drag from his pipe and then exhaled, letting the smoke mingle with the pipes in the engine room's ceiling. “In fact, we cannot formally spare any manpower or resources whatsoever for an excursion to Spain. We have too much to plan for.”

Lucky's heart sank when he heard the Colonel's words. He had to rescue Grease, but he knew the enormous cost in planning and resources that it would take to make the Colonel's declaration from only hours before a reality:

'In four days, Lucky,' he had sworn, 'I take this fight to the Fatherland'.

The old soldier leaned back and tapped his pipe on the table, making sure he had Lucky's undivided attention.

“But, if you were to disappear for the next four days without my knowledge, I would not be able to stop you,” he said slowly, making sure his every word was heard. “As a matter of fact, if one were to stow away on The Express in the next hour, one might find two volunteers with a full combat jump load-out and a prepped pilot ready to fly a recon sortie over Spain.”

He placed the thick Hellbörg file into Lucky's hands.

“The man you intend to confront is not to be underestimated. He has made murder his life's work and has lived as a king in his own perverse kingdom for half a decade. Intelligence indicates a strong mercenary presence. I advise discretion in order to take this objective.”

“Thank you, sir,” Lucky said, slowly thumbing through the thick file folder. “But this is my fight and it'll probably get me killed. Who’d volunteer for that?”

“You underestimate yourself,” the Colonel said. “You're a member of this team and friend to all. If I could spare it, we would all eagerly go with you. You have two of my best men, Official Ford,” the old soldier said. He smiled, and placed his hand on Lucky's shoulder, adding:

“Your pilot will give you the details, but regardless of what happens on the ground, I need all three of you back here within four days. Our target in Germany will be more dangerous even than Vesuvius, and a single piece out of place could spell doom for us all. You are part of this team and part of this family. We will need you with us. Go to the hangar now, and come back ready for a real row.”

With that, Lucky left the Colonel down there in the engine room, puffing on his pipe in solemn contemplation.

The forest was nearly as dark as that engine room had been, and Lucky realized he was alone. He had gotten lost, first in his thoughts, and then in these choking woods.

The Gallo Rojo was nowhere to be seen.

“Why stop?” a quiet voice whispered over Lucky's shoulder. He spun to find the masked warrior standing behind him, bladed Webley leveled at his gut. Lucky watched the blood-stained revolver warily.

“What now?” Lucky asked, steely as he could muster. The Gallo Rojo reached to the tree next to him and grabbed a broken branch about six feet up.

“Now we find out who you really are,” he said, then pulled down on the branch, which groaned and moved on an rusty hinge. Lucky heard a harsh grating sound behind him and turned to see a large boulder roll onto its side, revealing a yawning hole in the ground.

“Down there,” the Gallo Rojo said, gesturing to the opening with his pistol. With no other choice, Lucky obeyed and lowered himself into the pitch darkness.

He swung his legs down first but didn't encounter anything to stand on, not even when he let himself hang all the way down, just gripping packed dirt with his aching fingers. The Gallo Rojo looked down at Lucky, placed a heavy boot on his shoulder, and shoved down, hard. The dirt crumbled under Lucky's grip and he tumbled down the hole.

It was about ten feet deep, and Lucky landed heavily on his feet and stumbled in the darkness. He was ankle deep in sucking mud and almost lost a boot as he tried to keep his balance. The Gallo Rojo splashed down behind him, and Lucky looked back to see him standing in a dim beam of light that had managed to cut through the ashfall. He reached out into the shadow and pulled on something. The concealing boulder rumbled as it rolled back over, settling down on the small hole to seal them underground.

“Now, Americano, keep walking. We will talk soon,” the masked warrior said. The unmistakable point of a bayonet pressed into Lucky's back and a rough hand grabbed his collar and shoved him forward. Lucky put his hands ahead of him and began shuffling through the darkness, not knowing what lay before him in the pitch black.

The squelching sound of his footsteps were swallowed by the dank earthen walls, and he blindly trudged forward. The Gallo Rojo's bloody bayonet dug insistently between Lucky's ribs with each step.

MONDAY MORNING, JULY 12, 1943
EL GALLO ROJO’S REFUGE
THE SIERRA ESPUÑA MOUNTAINS, SPAIN

Lucky lost track of distance as soon as the boulder rolled back into place. Without that single beam of sunlight, the Gallo Rojo's tunnel was dark as a mine shaft. Lucky had to shuffle along at half-speed just to make sure he didn't snag a root or slip in the mud. His boots squished through a particularly juicy puddle that gave off an odor like bacon, but the Gallo Rojo didn't give him time to figure out what it was. His bayonet was impatient and kept them moving.

In the darkness, Lucky counted his steps. Every fifteen paces, the Gallo Rojo would tug on Lucky's collar like he was a jackass with a bit. They'd stop, then the Gallo would whisper past. Lucky'd hear faint noises, metal on metal, like the armored man was fiddling with some contraption, then with a dig of the blade the Gallo would appear behind him again and they'd make their way the next couple dozen yards before stopping again.

They were booby traps, they had to be. Judging by the Gallo’s arsenal, they weren’t looking at anything so innocent as spike pits or land mines, either. Lucky could only trudge onward and trust that the Gallo Rojo actually wanted to keep him alive.

After a few more stops, the Gallo yanked Lucky back and brushed past one last time. He fiddled with another set of mechanisms and a round door swung open into a hidden room. Yellow light flooded the tunnel. The Gallo Rojo stepped through the doorway and turned around, his revolver leveled at Lucky’s gut. He gestured with the bladed gun, saying:

“Come in, and close it behind you.”

Lucky obeyed, squinting as his eyes tried to adjust to the glow. It took both hands to move the heavy door. As soon as it was shut, he felt a half-dozen bolts inside slam into place, locking him in.

“Siéntate, Americano,” the Gallo ordered. Lucky hesitated, silently studying his bizarre surroundings.

A half-dozen oil lamps lit a surprisingly large room, a natural cavern that had been then enlarged by hand. Poplar roots crossed the ceiling like joists, while others ran up the walls as natural columns.

Every square foot of room was cluttered with junk. The closest piles were munitions crates marked with with Franco’s eagle and shield. Beyond the munitions, the rest of the space was was stuffed to the gills with ornate furniture and gold-framed oil paintings. The Gallo Rojo had carved little walkways between the loot, like game trails through a thick wood.

“I said 'sit,'” the Gallo Rojo grunted. There was something of a clearing in the center of the room, featuring a gilded glass-top sitting table between a pair of cots. Lucky froze in place and quickly scanned the room for another gun barrel tracking him. Another prod from the Gallo’s bayonet got him moving again, and he warily sank onto one cot at his captor’s insistence. Lucky found the masked man standing over him, pistol leveled in one hand, the other extended in Lucky’s face, palm up.

“Your tags. Slowly,” the Gallo demanded.

Lucky carefully reached behind his head, unhooked his dog tags, and placed them into the leather-gloved palm. The Gallo held them up and examined them through the tiny eye-slits of his medieval helmet. Whatever he saw made his whole body tense up.

“You are not Indian,” he growled. Leather creaked as his grip on his pistol suddenly tightened. Lucky’s eyes went wide.

“No, not India, Indiana!” Lucky explained, “It's a state, in America. I'm a Hoosier.”

The Gallo Rojo cocked his helmeted head, studied Lucky for an agonizing moment, then tossed the dog tags into his lap, apparently satisfied with his answer.

“Why are you here, Señor Ford? Have the Allies decided to help us, or are you still afraid of Franco?” he asked.

“I'm not here for the Allies, I'm here on my own. I’m looking for a man called ‘the Romanian,’” Lucky answered.

“I saw your plane fly over. American C-47, very quiet. You did not get here by yourself,” The Gallo Rojo said, probing for answers.

“I had the help of friends,” Lucky hesitated to say the words, but he knew he had no choice. He turned his shoulder to show the Eagle, Eye, and Sword patch, and continued, “Friends in the Office for the Cataloging of Unusual Occurrences. They have the resources to help meget here”

“Unusual occurrences,” the Gallo Rojo said slowly, as if trying to understand the how the words worked together. “I have not heard of this.”

“That's the idea. No one should ever hear about us, but I'm telling you now because I need help.”

“How do I know you are here to fight Hellbörg and not to help him?” the Gallo Rojo asked. He knew the Romanian’s real name. “Everyone has known of him, and his atrocities, for as long as he has been here, nothing has ever been done.”

“Like I said, my government didn't send me. I'm just here for a friend, and Hellbörg has him,” Lucky replied.

“It seems we are in a position to help each other, Señor Ford,” the masked warrior said, then lowered his pistol. “You need an informant, and a guide, and I need manpower. With cooperation, our goals can become one.”

“What is your goal?” Lucky asked.

“To end the corruption that has ruined this region,” the Gallo Rojo said. “Hellbörg, his bolseteros, his capitán, the government men he has bought and paid for. They all must go.”

The masked man stopped and turned, drawing Lucky's attention to the back of the cave. He had staked dozens of the canvas gas masks worn by the men in the forest into the wall. Each hanging mask was marred with blood stains, bullet holes, burns, and bayonet slashes. The bag men. Bolseteros.

“For now, I have only been able to hunt Hellbörg’s Portuguese slaves.”

“Portuguese?” Lucky asked. “What are they doing here?”

“A funny question from another foreigner,” the Gallo Rojo said. When he chuckled, the sound was a cold and mechanical rattle. “They are the remnants of a company of viriatos, Portuguese who fought for Franco. They had been held in an asylum after the war, until la Medida bought them. Now they whore themselves to Hellbörg and Espada for the smoke. They fight to the death for it.”

Lucky had no idea what the smoke was, but he could tell that the situation was far worse than the Colonel had known. And that the bolseteros were the abducted residents of the asylum was new intel. The Office had known about the missing patients, but not that they'd constitute an army. Lucky tried to bring his questions back around to the dangers he'd already encountered.

“And O'Laughlin's here to hunt you down?” Lucky asked.

“La Medida has grown irritated by my efforts,” The Gallo Rojo said, using the old Republican name for Hellbörg. “I have been fighting them alone for months. At first, we were sabotaging their transports, their supplies. We weren't killing. Not until...”

The masked warrior unconsciously looked to the only unlit corner of the cave. Lucky spotted a set of armor identical to the one the Gallo Rojo wore hanging up in the shadows of the hidden cavern. An eight-inch-long puncture marred its the steel chest plate, its edges ragged and punched inward.

“My brother had always been adamant about never taking a life, even those of our enemies. Los bolseteros have no such problems, and I do not, either,” the Gallo explained.

“I am sorry,” Lucky said, “I've lost people to these monsters, too.”

“Señor Ford, I do not need apologies, I need to see this through. A last nail for this coffin.”

“My friends and I can help you,” Lucky told him, “We just need to find them out there.”

“Yes, you will help me. I have only been hiding and reacting. With you, and your friends, we may attack.”

“If we can find my friends.”

“This is still my forest, even under the black sky. If los bolseteros and O'Laughlin have not found them yet, I can,” the Gallo Rojo said. While he spoke, he began unholstering the small arsenal he carried under his coat. The Webley revolvers went on top of a stack of munition crates, then the Verey flare guns. He removed the thick crimson trench coat and folded it neatly.

“I have whatever arms are needed, Señor Ford, and all in much better condition than the weapons our enemies carry,” he said. Lucky winced at the thought of that bloody rifle bolt embedded through the bolsetero's mask.

The Gallo unlaced the thick leather bracer from his forearm, careful to unhook the attached shotgun from its shoulder trigger as he set it down.

“You can call me Lucky, if you want,” Lucky told him, “Everyone else does.”

“Lucky? What does this mean?” he asked, voiced still muffled and echoing behind the steel helmet's visor.

“Um...,” Lucky mumbled, trying to recall any of the rudimentary Spanish he'd pretended to learn in school, “Afortunado, I think.”

“Yes, I see,” he answered. “Very well, Lucky Ford.”

The masked warrior unbuckled a massive belt covered in pouches and pockets, each rattling even more weapons.

“So what do I call you,” Lucky asked. “Is Gallo Rojo what you go by at home?”

“Ha, no,” he chuckled. He laid the belt across his pile of other gear and began to work at the leather straps securing his chest plate.

“El Gallo Rojo is a name from the people. They have only seen the red of my coat, and the 'beak' of my mask. A red rooster to the gossips,” he explained. He was finally free of the heavy plate and leaned the worn steel armor against the stack of crates. The thick quilted suit he wore beneath the armor disguised any hint of musculature, but Lucky'd seen him move. The man was coiled rattlesnake lightning under there. The Gallo Rojo began working at the latches of his helmet.

“I keep my name secret. My family was known in this country, before the war,” he explained. The metal clasps snapped open, splitting the helmet into two hinged pieces. With gloved hands, he grabbed the front half and lifted it up and off his head.

Gleaming raven hair cascaded from the open helmet, falling around over the Gallo's shoulders. Lucky's jaw dropped. He had suddenly found himself face-to-face with one of the most gorgeous women he'd ever met.

“I'm sorry, ma'am,” he stammered. “That is, thank you for...”

She stared at Lucky with intense emerald eyes while he wrestled with his words. She had olive skin and shimmering obsidian hair. The scowl that scrunched up her nose and furled her eyebrows made her even more entrancing.

“You expected el Gallo Rojo to be someone else?” she asked, her real voice light but raspy without the helmet disguising it.

Lucky tripped over his words, stammering to apologize:

“I, uh, what I mean is, I never thought, I mean...”

His tongue had never been more twisted. Suddenly the look of anger on her face melted, replaced by mischievous delight. Her scowl broke, becoming a beaming white smile.

“Calm down, Lucky, I am only joking with you,” she said. She took off one of her worn leather gloves and put out her hand.

Lucky took it without hesitation. It seemed so small, so soft against his own. He was suddenly conscious of every callous and scrape, every particle of ground-in ash and dirt on his palm and how it scraped against her smooth skin. She held his battered hand for what seemed like a long time. Her emerald stare dove deep into his brown eyes, and she smiled a little as she quietly said:

“Me llamo Emilia Rosales.”

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Copyright © 2023 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Dudu Torres. Spanish translations by Caitlin Gilmore.