Free ViraVax by Bill Ransom Page B

bottom of the condom dispenser rested atop the ice in the champagne bucket. Harry thought that they wouldn’t be very comfortable chilled like that.
    He set the towels down and picked up a brochure that listed certain personal appliances that could be rented from the management, and an accompanying illustration showed three large penis-like devices. His Spanish wasn’t good enough to decipher all of the instructions.
    “Put that down,” his mother said. “You might be as smart as an adult, but you’re still just fifteen.”
    He sat down gingerly on the bed, more aches and pains reducing his movement to a series of cartoon-like jerks.
    “Now,” she said, “we’ll see. . . .”
    His mother opened a bedside drawer, where most motels kept their Bibles. She pulled the drawer completely from the cabinet. Taped to the back was a fat brown envelope.
    Harry heard a car pull into the garage. The door rumbled closed and footsteps walked away. His mother, who had been holding her breath, relaxed. She shook out the envelope’s contents onto the bed: car keys, Canadian passports, Canadian and Costa Bravan currency, some note cards and databacks. The passport with Harry’s picture was registered to James McCarron, a fifteen-year-old from Coquitlam, British Columbia.
    The bedspread smelled of cigarettes and chocolate. Chocolate reminded Harry that he’d been too wound up to eat, and his stomach growled. His mother heard it, too, and dug out a candy bar from the bottom of her purse.
    His face hurt to chew, so Harry just let it melt in his mouth. His mother scooped everything into the envelope except the car keys and led him back into the garage.
    “I paid for the night,” she said. “That might buy us some time.”
    Their car was a beat-up, pre-millennium Lada taxicab. Harry’s mother picked up a Tigers baseball cap from the backseat and tucked her blonde hair inside. No passenger seat in front, so Harry got in back.
    “Where to, young fellow?” she asked.
    “To the airport,” Harry said, “and step on it.” He tried a smile, but it hurt too much.
    “We’ll take the scenic route,” she said. “I think you’ll appreciate it.”
    She hopped out quickly and closed the garage door behind them. A couple of kilometers later, two embassy staff cars swept past them, accompanied by a jeep with a pair of MPs, led by a Costa Bravan Special Security van.
    “Looks like Gil didn’t believe we had guesthouse privileges,” she muttered. “It’ll take them a while to get into that room—the President or the mayor could be in there with one of their wives, for all they know.”
    She drove them south, out of the city, through the lowland farms and into the hills. This coffee country was protected from guerrilla attack by the private security forces hired by the growers, and by small monthly payoffs. Harry believed that many of the security forces worked both sides of the fence, a notion not all that uncommon in embassy circles.
    His mother turned onto a well-kept side road and stopped the taxi at a huge iron gate decorated with a giant maple leaf and the words “Casa Canada.”
    On other plantations the workers lived in cardboard appliance cartons or under makeshift plastic tents. Here at Casa Canada each family was provided a two-room cabin with cement floor, a water spigot and a garden plot. Single men and women occupied two bunkhouses that flanked the cabins. Someone had fashioned play equipment for children out of a few dozen old tractor tires.
    A long concrete trough under a thatched roof made up the laundry. All of the able-bodied men were in the fields, in the army or with the guerrillas.
    “This isn’t the road to the airport,” Harry said.
    “You didn’t say which airport.”
    They swept past the huge drying area with its mounds of coffee beans, the aroma so thick that it even penetrated Harry’s swollen, blood-encrusted nostrils. Three long sheds abutted this area, and past the sheds stretched a concrete runway.