He holds a rifle in each hand. And now they are the ones afraid and begging:
—Not the guns, mister! Not the guns!
Benavídez is already up and grabs Lizaso by the hand.
—Let’s go, Carlitos!
Troxler brings the heads of the two guards together and throws each one in a different direction, like dolls. He leaps up and is swallowed by the night.
The anonymous NCO (or is he an apparition?) is slow to respond. He tries to get up too late. A third guard is aiming his rifle at him from the front end of the vehicle. A shot is heard. The NCO lets out an ‘Aaah!’ and sits back down, just as he was. Only dead.
Benavídez jumps. He feels Carlitos’ fingers slipping away from his own. In a state of desperate helplessness, he realizes he has lost him, that the boy has been buried beneath three bodies that are holding him down.
The policemen on the ground hear the shot behind them and hesitate for a fraction of a second. Some turn around.
Giunta doesn’t wait any longer. He runs!
Gavino does the same.
The herd begins to separate.
—Shoot them! —screams Rodríguez Moreno.
Livraga throws himself headfirst to the ground. Farther ahead, Di Chiano also takes a dive.
The shots thunder in the night.
Giunta feels a bullet whiz by his ear. He hears a commotion behind him, a low moaning and the thump of a body falling. It’s probably Garibotti. An amazing instinct tells Giunta to drop to the ground and not move.
Carranza is still on his knees. They put a rifle to the nape of his neck and fire. Later they riddle his entire body with bullets.
Brión has little chance of escaping with that white cardigan that shines in the night. We don’t even know if he tries.
Vicente Rodríguez has dropped to the ground once already. Now he hears the guards running toward him. He tries to get up, but can’t. He has tired himself out in the first thirty meters of his escape and it isn’t easy to move all one hundred of his kilos. By the time he gets going, it’s too late. The second round of shots takes him out.
Horacio di Chiano rolled over twice and froze, playing dead. He hears the bullets destined for Rodríguez whistle overhead. One cuts very close to his face and covers him in dirt. Another rips through his pants without wounding him.
Giunta stays glued to the ground for about thirty seconds, invisible. Suddenly he leaps up like a hare and starts to zigzag. When he senses the shots coming, he throws himself back on the ground. Almost instantaneously, he hears the astounding whir of the bullets again. But by now he is far away. He is nearly safe. When he repeats his maneuver, they won’t even see him.
Díaz escapes. We don’t know how, but he escapes.22 Gavino runs for two or three hundred meters before stopping. At that moment, he hears another series of explosions and a terrifying shriek that tears through the night and seems to last forever.
—May God forgive me, Lizaso —he will later say, weeping, to one of Carlitos’ brothers.— But I think that was your brother. I think he saw everything and was the last to die.
Up above the bodies stretched out in the garbage dump, where the caustic smoke of the gunpowder still burns in the glow of the headlights, a few groans hang in the air. A new burst of bullets seems to put an end to them. But then Livraga, who is still frozen and unnoticed in the spot where he fell, hears the bloodcurdling voice of his friend Rodríguez, who says:
—Kill me! Don’t leave me like this! Kill me!