Part 1
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“I can’t stand it anymore! Please take me to the hospital!
The scream of Ricardo Torres went through the morning like a shot.
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It was 3:17 when Leonardo Ramírez stopped the military van in front of the emergency room of the General Hospital of Tuxtla Gutierrez. The rain hit the windshield, the red lights of the entrance flashed on the wet pavement and Ricardo, in the uniform soaked in sweat, bent on himself holding a huge, round belly, impossible to hide.
“Help! “” cried Leonardo. A doctor, please!
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Dr. Marcos Salcedo ran out of the guard area. He had been attending for fifteen years to emergencies, complicated deliveries, road accidents, machete injuries and crises of all kinds. But nothing prepared him to see a young soldier, with muddy boots and army uniform, shaking with a woman’s womb about to give birth.
“What happened to him?” he asked, kneeling next to the stretcher.
Ricardo had a white face as paper. I could barely breathe.
“Something moves…wlk in here… it hurts me like I’m broken.
The doctor carefully touched that tight belly. He felt a blow from the inside. Then another. It stayed icy.w
Leonardo looked at him desperately.
Doctor, he’s a man. I’ve known him since the Military Academy. It can’t be what you’re thinking.
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“I’m not thinking anything yet,” Marcos replied, though his eyes said otherwise. Take him to ultrasound. Now.
As they moved down the hall, some nurses stopped. A soldier with a giant belly, moaning as if he were in labor, was a scene that no one could understand. Ricardo squeezed Leonardo’s hand so hard that he left his white knuckles.
“Don’t let them call the captain,” he whispered.
What?
“Promise me.
Leonardo didn’t understand anything. Eight months ago they had left a base together in Puebla for a special training in the Selva Lacandona, in Chiapas. From day one, Richard had been strange. More quiet. More nervous. He said he had had an accident before traveling and had lost some of his memory. At first Leonardo believed it, but over the months began the angers, nausea, fainting and that belly that grew week after week.
The other soldiers were making fun.
“Look, Torres seems pregnant.
Ricardo crouched his gaze and kept walking, his jaw tight.
Now, in front of the ultrasound screen, all the jokes became a nightmare.
Dr. Marcos slid the transducer over the abdomen. The image took a few seconds to clear. Then two small silhouettes appeared, perfectly formed, moving inside Ricardo s.
The nurse released a rosary.
“Holy God…
The doctor swallowed saliva.
There are two babies. Two hearts beating.
Leonardo backed up, taking a hand to his mouth.
“No… that can’t be.
Richard closed his eyes. A tear crossed his temple.
I can’t hide it anymore.
A violent contraction arched his body. The monitor started ringing urgently.
“O.D.,” the doctor ordered. We have to get those babies out now.
Leonardo ran next to the stretcher.
“Ricardo, look at me. What’s going on?
Ricardo could barely open his eyes.
“Forgive me, Leo.
Why?
But he did not answer anymore. He lost consciousness before entering the operating room.
During the preparation, a nurse cut the uniform. He stopped suddenly discovering the tight bandages under his clothes, the marks on his skin and the truth that the uniform had hidden for months.
Dr. Marcos realized then that the mystery was not a doctor.
He was human.
And far more dangerous than everyone imagined.
When the operating room doors closed, Leonardo stood alone in the hallway, soaked, shaking, with a question stuck in his chest:
If that soldier wasn’t really Ricardo… where was his best friend?
Eight months earlier, the morning of the departure to Chiapas, Leonardo was the only one who noticed that something did not fit.
The military convoy was waiting in the courtyard of the base in Puebla. Soldiers were riding with backpacks, training weapons and dream faces. Captain Ernesto Silveira was reviewing a list with Sgt. Martin Luna, two tough, respected and feared men.
“Miss Ricardo Torres,” Leonardo said, “wlk. He’s never late.
The sergeant snorted.
The army is waiting for no one.
But when the bus engine was already on, a figure appeared running through the entrance. Ricardo gasped up, pale, with a small wound near the eyebrow.
“I had an accident,” he explained. I don’t remember what happened.
Captain Silveira looked at him as if he had seen a ghost.
“An accident?”
“Yes, my captain. I woke up in a hospital.
Silveira and the sergeant exchanged a quick, almost imperceptible look. Leonardo saw her. He didn’t understand, but he saw it.
Since that day, Ricardo was another. He did not remember jokes from the academy, avoided dressing rooms, changed his back and became ill every morning. In the jungle, while the others learned to orient themselves between mud, rain and mosquitoes, he seemed to fight something within himself.
One night, sitting next to the base foog, Leonardo confronted him.
You are not the Richard I know.
The person with Ricardo’s face looked at him for a long time. Her eyes were filled with fear.
I can’t tell you yet.
Then what do you want me to think?
“Trust me a little more.
Leonardo wanted to get angry, but something in that voice stopped him. It was not a simple lie. It was despair.
Over the months, the belly grew. Ricardo wore wide T-shirts, carried backpacks in front, offered for night guards to avoid sleeping near others. One morning, Leonardo heard him moaning behind a door.
“Are you sick?s”
“Something is moving,” Richard confessed at last, with tears of shame. I don’t know how much longer I can hide it.
You need a hospital.
“If I get out of here, Silveira kills me.
It was the first time Leonardo heard that name with real fear.
Why would he kill you?
Ricardo lowered his voice.
“Because my brother found out what he and Luna were doing.
Leonardo was still.
“Your brother?”
Pero no hubo tiempo para más. Esa misma semana, durante una práctica en la selva, el sargento Luna ordenó a Ricardo revisar una zona aislada cerca del río. Leonardo desobedeció la formación y lo siguió de lejos. Vio al sargento empujar a Ricardo contra un árbol.
“I don’t know what you are,” Luna said, “but if you remember anything, don’t leave this jungle.
Leonardo felt his stomach turn.
That night he decided to get Ricardo out of the base. They stole a service van and drove for hours on dirt roads, between rain, closed mountain and puddles that seemed to swallow the tires. Ricardo was screaming in the back seat. The contractions no longer stopped.
“Heaps,” Leonardo said. We’re almost there.
