It was late, yet the heat still clung to Palmira.
The air pressed heavily against the skin, thick with dust and the lingering sweetness of cut cane. Behind them, the city had already begun to fall away. The storefronts grew sparse. The streetlights grew farther apart, and between them, darkness settled across the road.
Maribel was in the passenger seat, her elbow on the door, her dress a little stuck to her back. She'd taken her shoes off and put them under the seat. She talked to the driver easily about not much—work, the heat, how the evenings didn't ever seem to get cooler now.
She had the sort of voice people answered.
The driver laughed more than the talk deserved; an older man, careful in what he said, but kind in how he acted. The kind of man who spoke carefully and drove carefully, as if both were habits learned long ago.
A rosary hung from the rearview mirror. The beads gently clinked together whenever the car hit a crack in the road. They caught the light from passing cars, shining briefly before vanishing.
Maribel reached for the window.
The air inside the car had turned thick and suffocating.
Before she could get it down, the driver said, softly,
“No.”
Her hand stopped on the switch.
“Why?”
He paused without replying. His eyes moved to the mirror, to the rosary swinging there. Almost instinctively, he made the sign of the cross.
Then he looked back to the road.
“It's broken,” he said.
Maribel looked at his face, expecting the smile that would reveal the joke was coming.
It didn't.
The reason hung between them, faint and uncertain. Still, she nodded. After a moment, she crossed herself too, a shy gesture, more out of habit than faith. She wasn't sure why she'd done it—only that it suddenly felt right.
They came to a red light.
Past her window, the road ended where a dense cluster of trees began. The branches intertwined overhead, blocking nearly all the light. Out here, city noises had completely faded away.
Even the bugs seemed quiet.
Then they heard something in the trees.
A rough, uneven sound.
Breathing.
Wet. Labored. Close enough that it seemed impossible they could not see what made it.
Maribel moved a little toward the window.
The sound was there once more.
Suddenly, a desperate cry burst from the trees, rough and animal-like. Hooves pounded the ground in a frantic, jagged rhythm—hitting hard as something blindly ran into the darkness.
The man who drove the car became rigid.
The hooves were thumping quicker for a bit, going through bushes.
Then a big weight came down.
Something heavy hit the earth with a final, muffled impact.
The hooves scratched feebly, a couple of times.
The breath came back, though more slowly now, broken, and into a quiet, painful groan.
Then, nothing.
Not silence.
The absence left behind after something stops struggling.
The driver's hands gripped the wheel more firmly.
Not speaking, he put the car in gear and went through the red signal.
Maribel turned to him, already beginning to ask what was going on.
He didn't look at her.
His eyes stayed on the road ahead, his jaw tight, his foot pressing harder against the accelerator.
Maribel looked back through the side window.
The trees had already swallowed the darkness again, the road empty, the woods silent as if nothing had ever moved there at all.
The driver kept his eyes fixed ahead, driving faster than the road deserved.
Maribel kept watching the trees.
Her heart was beating hard.
But beneath the fear, something else had already taken hold.
Something about the sound had caught inside her immediately.
Recognition before understanding.
Not fear.
Recognition.
Her pulse had already changed before she understood why.
She rubbed her arms, though the air was still heavy with heat.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
The driver nodded once, but did not slow down.
Neither of them spoke again.
Behind them, the woods closed over the road, keeping whatever had happened there to itself.
Maribel turned back in her seat, the strange feeling still sitting quietly in her chest.
She did not know it yet, but somewhere beyond the cane fields, two men were already moving toward the sound in the dark.
They crossed the pasture shortly after midnight.
The rain had weakened to a drifting mist, the kind that soaked through before you noticed your clothes were wet. Grass brushed against their boots and bent into black mud beneath their weight.
Ahead of them, the fence sagged where the wire had rusted through. The wooden posts leaned at tired angles, half-swallowed by the wet ground.
Malú reached the gap first.
He stopped there a second, one hand against the wire as he judged the space with unnecessary seriousness.
“You know,” he muttered, “one day this thing is going to take my shirt.”
Parido stepped up behind him.
“The shirt already looks dead.”
Malú snorted softly through his nose.
“It's a good shirt.”
“You said that about the last one.”
“The last one was a good shirt too.”
Parido pushed the wire aside without ceremony and stepped through, his backpack snagged on it, exposing the stakes inside. He secured the flap of the bag.
The cattle farther out in the field lifted their heads at the sound, shapes shifting slowly in the mist before settling again.
Malú looked back at him.
“You move like the police.”
“You complain like an old woman.”
“I feel like an old woman.”
That earned the faintest hint of a smile from Parido, brief enough to disappear almost immediately.
Then both men looked toward the trees.