It was there and then it was gone, only a reddish mist left hanging in the air like a bloody thumbprint. Shattered glasses falling to the ground. Then Castel himself was gone, too, all of him, as if he had never been; vanishing completely. The night that had been stalking them took him just like that, just like a pouncing jaguar. Juan Pablo shouted, pointing at the place where Castel had been standing, as another bullet came through an open window and punched him in the throat. He looked down at his hands, opening and closing them like he was trying to hold on to something he couldn’t see, before falling backward into his seat. His steaming blood hit Iker in the face, who screamed and scrambled to wipe it off, but not before three fingers of his frantic left hand were clipped off by another passing bullet. Then the whole bus was filled with them: bullets from every direction, like heavy bugs battering at the inside of a glass lamp, each as big as the pale leopard moths Chayo had collected in jars as a boy. The normalistas began screaming and throwing themselves down between the seats and on the floor to escape them.

Chayo saw the driver Naranja stand, his great bulk eclipsing the light from the truck in front of them. It was like he was lit from within, the tips of his hair burnished by light. He waved his fat arms as if waving the bullets away, trying to shield a boy Chayo did not know well, until the funny and brave bus driver took one, two, three bullets in the stomach and chest and the bus’s windshield buckled, flecking his falling body with glass.

An hour earlier he’d been eating an empanada and laughing with them.

Él sólo murió por nosotros.

No . . . no . . . we killed him.

Limón had already abandoned his bus, leaving Naranja’s pinned between the other two vehicles. Both buses were under heavy fire now, bullets ricocheting off their metal skin, hot sparks dancing in the air. Glass was breaking and blown tires were groaning like old men. Normalistas were crawling over one another and fleeing the buses, making a wild run across the intersection, some waving cell phones in the air, either trying to make calls or film what was happening to them. But they were only beacons, as bright and telling as flashlights, and the men hidden in the shadows used them to track the fleeing students over the dark streets.

Chayo saw one after another go down, their phones left bouncing across the pavement.