Page 6 of The Code (Orphan X)

All Fight. No Flight.

Shiny penny-size blood drops on the white tile floor of the East Los Angeles bodega reflect back the sterile fluorescent lights above. In the immediate wake of the violence, the bodega is deserted, aside from the clerk who clutches his chest with one hand and covers his mouth with the other. His ancient sun-beaten skin is paper thin, and he is frail, bones tenting the fabric of his off-brand polo. He has seen a lot of violence in his day. But nothing like this.

A finger, cleanly sliced off, has landed on the cloudy plastic mat beside the cash register. An arm, severed just below the elbow, rests on the floor a short distance from the check-out counter. The wrist, grotesquely, still wears a retro Pac-Man watch. The clerk is incapable of tearing his gaze away.

A display of Hostess desserts is knocked over from the post-ambush struggle, Ho Hos, Twinkies, and Sno Balls strewn across the spattered floor. Ghostly crimson footprints choreograph the struggle where five grown men attacked Lesandro, a fifteen-year-old boy they had mistaken for a rival gang member.

The revelation of Lesandro’s mistaken identity came only after half of his limb was cleaved from his body in a single hack. In an instant the boy had been transformed from mistaken target to innocent to witness capable of testifying against his five attackers, his own disfigurement ensuring the hit on him had to proceed. In the momentary confusion, Lesandro had managed—barely—to flee.

A bloody handprint mars the glass of the single automatic door, which bangs open and shut against Lesandro’s shed Air Jordan, which lies trapped in the threshold. Night air blows through in sporadic puffs, tasting of car exhaust, oil, carne asada on a distant grill.

If you ease through the oscillating gap into the chill black night, you can follow various footprints for a half block until the red fades away. After that, a convenient trail of dribbled blood continues to mark the way. You might catch up, if not to Lesandro, panting and wild-eyed, then at least to the five men in pursuit of him.

A half block behind him but closing the gap, they wear wifebeaters or white T-shirts with blocks of blue, red, and green. They wear headbands or backward baseball caps with flat brims. They wear expressions of teeth-bared malice and flecks of blood on their cheeks.

You might not believe there is a gang as vicious as MS-13, but that speaks only to the limits of your imagination. The decades-old Trinitarios were birthed in Rikers Island to protect Dominican inmates from the Salvadorans, Latin Kings, Bloods, and other predators feeding inside the lethal prison ecosystem. Their weapons of choice are machetes because, they are fond of saying, a gun runs out of bullets but a blade never does. Torture and murder, home invasions and drug running, they do it all. So vicious are they that the gang itself splinters and those splinters splinter until they are a rageful disintegration of packs turning on themselves, maiming and killing indiscriminately.

An East Coast gang, they have recently spread to make inroads on the left coast, a murderous manifest destiny. These five Trinitarios are at the forefront, franchise openers for East L.A.

Right now they are picking up steam.

Lesandro is losing steam. Understandably so.

His sock flops from his shoeless foot. He stumbles and weaves along the sidewalk, occasional passersby darting to safety in doorways or sprinting across the street. His face is pale, lips dry and cracked, flaked with cotton in the corners. Now he can hear the footfall behind him, quickening.

Cupping his stump, he bolts up a narrow and dark side road, the streetlights flickering or shot out overhead. On either side of the potholed stretch of asphalt loom long-abandoned places of business—a graffiti-covered mechanic shop, a shut-down textile-processing plant, a low-income housing unit scorched through with arsonist’s fire. Jagged mouths of window openings sip in the night. Discarded furniture rises from dumpsters.

As Lesandro casts a frantic glance over his shoulder, he staggers into a parking meter, which knocks him across the curb and into the street.

A truck bears down.

Not just any truck.

A discreet-armored Ford F-150.

Behind the wheel sits a shadowed form of a man, ordinary of size and bearing.

The truck halts abruptly, veering sharply to barely avoiding finishing what the Trinitarios started in the bodega.

Lesandro slams into the passenger-side door of the truck. Internally lined with bullet-resistant Kevlar, it does not dent. He takes a few wobbly steps up onto the curb and leans against a rough brick wall beside a blown-out window. Breath heaves from him.

His pursuers near, backlit. Their shadows pull high up the dilapidated buildings, a convoy of ghouls. If you squint, you might make out the silhouettes of machetes at their sides, dancing along the wall.

Lesandro is a sweet boy with Gauguin eyes and a broad, pleasing nose. He sags against the brick rise, his face tilted down. He is drooling. At his side, wind sucks through the broken pane, a wail that underscores his own labored breathing.

The men rush forward, closing in on Lesandro.

The truck’s passenger door flies open, catching the first in line squarely.

He body-slams into the door, his nose meeting the laminated armor glass of the window. The glass does not crack, but one cheek and two ribs do. The man emits not so much a grunt as an ejection of air, and collapses onto the street. Inside the truck, the dark form in the driver’s seat leans over once again, and the door pulls shut above the unconscious body.

The other four men halt in the darkness of the street, weapons dangling at their sides, breath huffing in the February air. Three of the men wield machetes. One holds instead a slender steel pipe. Silence befalls the street.

The driver’s door opens.

An Original S.W.A.T. tactical boot sets down onto the street.

The man emerges.

He is known by different names—Orphan X, the Nowhere Man, Evan Smoak.

He removes a rugged-looking phone from his pocket and dials three numbers, gazing calmly at the men. “Yes, hello. Please send ambulances and PD to this location. I’ll text decimal coordinates now. There are six injured parties.”

The Trinitarios look at him, more perplexed than angry, their heads tilted in comical unison.

“Yes, six,” Orphan X continues. “The most acute is a young man with a severed left arm and a finger missing from his right hand. The wound has just been stabilized and I’ve started fluids. The arm is likely gone but please bring a waterproof bag and ice container for the finger in case it can be located.”

“Hey,” one of the gangsters says. And then, louder, “Hey!”

Orphan X holds up a just-a-sec finger to him, listening to the question over the phone. “The other injuries? Those have yet to be ascertained.”

On the ground by the passenger door, the fallen man releases a moan of pain before falling unconscious again.

“Rapa tu mai,” one of his cohorts hisses at Orphan X through irregular gold teeth.

“Depending on how this goes,” Orphan X says into the phone, “you may want to send a hearse as well.”

He hangs up. Frowns at the screen. Thumbs once. A bloop sound effect confirms the conveyance of coordinates to 911.

Casually, he circles the back of his truck, passing within feet of the poleaxed gang members as he walks over to Lesandro. Blood drools from the stump through the thumb and remaining three fingers of the boy’s good hand. His teeth chatter.

Orphan X takes the boy gently by the shoulders and slides him down the wall to sit. Wind hisses across the broken glass of the pane to their side. A weathered mural of a young mother and her younger girl remains faded on the brick near them, dates bookending too-short lives, a memorial for the Trinitarios’ last innocent bystanders.

Lesandro’s teeth chatter some more. “My watch,” he says. “I c-can’t find my watch.”

Crouching over him, Orphan X says, “It’s okay. We’ll get it soon enough.”

“Yo,” one of the attackers says, stepping forward. “What the fuck, mamagüevo? You know where you are right now?”

The machete tap-tap-taps the outside of his thigh.

Orphan X turns to appraise the man in full. His white T-shirt looks useful.

Orphan X’s left hand blurs and a Strider folding knife lifts from his pocket, snapped open by the very gesture. The machete has no chance to lift from the man’s side before Orphan X steps forward and punches the knife into the intercostal space between the man’s second and third ribs. Air hisses out as the lung collapses.

Orphan X push-kicks him in the hip, spinning him around, grabbing a fistful of shirt at the back collar, and whipping the Strider upward to rake through the fabric.

The man falls out of his own shirt and fetal-curls on the asphalt, lips guppying.

The three remaining men take an inadvertent step away.

Again, Orphan X turns his back on them.

Returns focus to the boy.

He pulls the ribboned shirt taut and starts tying it around the boy’s arm, just above the stump. The boy’s lost left forearm and hand will be unusable, but the missing finger of the right hand shows a clean amputation line. Given the damage on the other side, it would be beneficial for the boy to retain all five digits of his dominant hand.

One of Lesandro’s feet wags back and forth, the dirty sock half pulled off over the toes. His head dips, eyelids fluttering.

“Look at me,” Orphan X says. “Look at my eyes. See my nose? We’re here together.”

Lesandro’s gaze comes into brief focus.

“Name. What’s your name?”

His lips move but the rest of his face stays locked in shock. “L-Lesandro … Candella.”

“Where is your finger?”

Lesandro jerks his head slightly to the north. “Bodega. Block that way. Where they j-jumped me.”

Weak words. Heavily accented English. The rhythm of the accent sounds Dominican.

Orphan X cinches the knot. He proffers the tail of fabric to Lesandro so he can hold it tight. “Fist or mouth?”

Lesandro’s right hand clenches weakly. “Mouth.”

Orphan X guides the end of the makeshift torniquet to Lesandro’s teeth, and the boy clenches down. Orphan X sends a second text to 911. Retrieve severed digit in bodega one block west.

From behind them: “Yo, bitch. We gonna take your head.”

Orphan X rises once more, turns to face his recent interlocutor. He’s the biggest of the group, a low wide belly stretching a guayabera shirt, slugs of belly fat hanging out the bottom hem on either side.

“How thick is that pipe?” Orphan X asks him.

The fat man’s eyes jag briefly to the pipe in his raised fist, time enough for Orphan X to crash forward and lock it up with both hands, slamming it into the man’s broad chest. One of the other men swings the machete at Orphan X’s head but X skips forward, propelling the fat man with him, and the blade sails past him, embedding in the shoulder of the third man.

An unhuman wail. The injured man falls away, the flesh-buried machete coming with him, his friend staring with dismay.

Orphan X twists the pipe from the fat man’s grip and in a single swift motion rotates it up beneath the padded chin, shattering the jaw. Before the fat man can tumble, Orphan X spins to crack the last man standing on the side of the neck. A debilitating blow that crushes the carotid artery, disrupting blood flow to the brain. It also strikes the vagus nerve, dropping heart rate and blood pressure, and the man himself to the asphalt.

Five men down, drawing rasping breaths or whimpering. The flickering streetlights bathe them in horror-movie lighting.

Orphan X returns to Lesandro. White-faced, the boy holds the end of the tourniquet between his clenched jaws. Orphan X tries to take it back from him, but the boy will not let go.

“Hey. Hey. Look at me. It’s okay. You did great. You can let go now.”

Lesandro releases his jaws.

Orphan X slips the slender pipe through the knotted fabric and twists it, cinching the tourniquet tighter. After a turn and a half, the boy passes out.

That’s good. He could use a break.

Orphan X tucks the pipe beneath the boy’s armpit to hold the tension and walks back to his truck.

The man puddled beside the passenger door manages to hoists himself up onto his elbows, blood from his shattered nose streaming over his mouth and chin like a wide-based goatee.

As Orphan X passes, he stoops to strike him in the side of the head, a quick jab that knocks him unconscious once more.

Orphan X hops in the truck and reverses swiftly, tucking the truck into an alley ten meters away. From the locked vaults in the truck bed, he removes a bag of saline, tubing, and duct tape. As he jogs back to the boy, he notices the man with the machete embedded in his shoulder hunched on his side, fingers digging at the leg of his jeans. The denim cuff has hiked up, revealing a revolver in an ankle holster. Orphan X kicks him in the side of the head, knocking him out for good. He removes the revolver, heels it down a sewer grate.

Back to Lesandro. Spiking the saline bag, he slips the catheter into the antecubital vein in the good arm. The boy stirs but does not wake.

Orphan X squeezes the bag to start the saline bolus. Lesandro’s eyes flutter open.

Orphan X eases him onto his side, cupping his cheek so it doesn’t strike the pavement. “You’re safe now,” he says. “You can rest some.”

At last comes the sound of sirens, perhaps a half mile away.

Orphan X duct-tapes the saline bag to the brick wall above the boy’s body, letting gravity do its work.

To his side, the fat man grunts and sits up abruptly and stiffly, a vampire rising from a casket. His lower face is ruinous, a morass of bone and blood, his teeth chipped down to little jagged nubs. The sirens grow louder; Orphan X can even make out the squealing of tires.

As Orphan X walks over, the man raises his hand, fingers splayed against what is coming. He is fortunate to still have both arms to raise.

Orphan X leans over to squeeze his trachea, thumb and fingers expertly seeking out the right arteries, veins, and nerves without crushing the windpipe.

The fat man gurgles and stares up with pleading eyes. When his pupils roll up, Orphan X releases the compression. The man collapses once more, the back of his head knocking the asphalt.

Flashing-light projections come visible on the main street ahead, throwing patterns against the storefronts.

Orphan X returns to Lesandro, checks the saline bag and the infusion. The boy stares up at him, his sclera pronounced. “Wh-what’s gonna happen … me?”

He looks so scared, so lost.

Orphan X wonders what will happen to this young man. Will he be able to handle what he needs to in order to repair himself? Can he afford the medical interventions necessary to put himself back together? Do Orphan X’s responsibilities to Lesandro end once he is out of sight?

These are not the kinds of questions Orphan X has been trained to contend with. Nor are they ones he welcomes.

He crouches over Lesandro once more.

“There will be pain,” Orphan X tells him, “and it will be hard. But you will be whole again.”

Lesandro nods, tears leaking.

Orphan X rises. The wind tunnel of the narrow street plasters his shirt to his torso. You might make out the outline of his appendix carry holster and the ARES 1911 ghost gun it contains.

All this time he had a pistol. He just never bothered to draw it.

The sirens are close enough now that they sound like a scream. The red-and-blue strobing on the main street grows more intense. Orphan X ducks through the shattered window near Lesandro’s curled form, vanishing into the building. As the emergency vehicles sweep around the corner, their approach masks the sound of an F-150 engine turning over and coasting invisibly away.

If you could check Orphan X’s vitals, you’d find them normal. Body temperature 98.6°F, heart rate 60, respiratory rate 14, oxygen saturation 99 percent, blood pressure an athletic 105 over 55. He has not broken a sweat.

He is all fight. No flight.

You might wonder if he is real.

You might wonder if anything scares him.

You might wonder if he sleeps and, if he does, what nightmares haunt him.