Esperanza (13 page)

The fog thinned rapidly and now Tess could see Granger and his men huddled in the courtyard. There, off to her left, from the same direction where the voice had been, Nomad emerged from the fog, carrying something in his mouth. The men couldn’t see him yet, but the dog saw Tess and immediately turned toward her, his strange eyes regarding her with what seemed like astonishment and an underlying fear.

Baffled, Tess got to her feet and looked around quickly for some sign of the woman she’d heard talking about betrayal and tribes. But she seemed to be the only woman in the immediate vicinity. Nomad reached her, dropped a sock at her feet, then sat back, tail wagging.

“I bet you saw them,” Tess said. “The man and woman who were talking.” Tess picked up the sock, a note attached to it. She couldn’t read the language in which it was written. “Let’s go find Ian, Nomad.”

As they came out of the trees, men were huddled around Ian, who sat at the edge of the courtyard fountain, a towel pressed to his bleeding temple. It wasn’t immediately clear to her what was going on. “Ian, you okay?” she called.

Heads turned her way. “For the moment,” he said.

“He’ll need a couple of stitches,” Granger said. “We’ve called the doctor.”

“How gracious of you, since one of your men tackled him out there in the fog.”

“It was a misunderstanding,” Granger replied quickly. Too quickly. “And I’ll take that shotgun, mate. It belongs to Juanito.”

“I’ll be glad to return the shotgun after you translate this.” She thrust the sock at him. “Nomad came out of the fog with it.”

He glanced at the note, shook his head. “Can’t read it. Sorry. English and tortured Spanish are the limits of my linguistic skills.”

“Then maybe you can tell me what a
transitional
is, Ed.”

“A transitional?” He blinked rapidly, as if he had dust in his eyes. “Well, I know what ‘transition’ means, but I can’t say I’ve ever heard the word ‘transitional.’ Why?”

“You’re a lousy liar.” She threw down the sock, tossed the rifle on the ground. “We’ll be checking out as soon as we find other accommodations, Mr. Granger. Please have our bill ready and open up those goddamn shutters.”

She strode past them, to Ian, who was already on his feet, looking pale, shaken. As they headed back toward the cottage, Nomad following them, Ian said, “What the fuck happened out there?”

“I’m not sure. I heard a man and a woman talking, but I couldn’t see them. I don’t have any idea who the woman was since I’m the only female out here. How bad is your head?”

“When the bastard tackled me, my head hit a rock.” He moved the blood-soaked towel away. “How’s it look?”

She winced. “Awful. There’s a first-aid kit in the cottage. I’ll work on it till the doctor arrives.”

“And once he does, you go on into town and find us a way out of here. Bus, train, a driver, I don’t care what it is. We shouldn’t stick around here any longer than we have to.”

She agreed completely. “If I can’t find public transportation, I’ll offer Manuel a sum he can’t refuse to drive us to the nearest airport.”

Dominica waited on a dirt road without shelter from the bitter wind, in a place so devoid of beauty that it tore at her. In the distance, across the miles of flatness, an object sped toward her, a storm of dust following it. Ben, driving his favorite car, a 1992 Mercedes Benz 500 SL.

Moments later, the car roared up alongside her, stopped, and Dominica climbed into the passenger seat, suddenly and completely exhausted. “Worn out?” Ben asked.

“Very.” She would not tell him about Wayra, and quickly locked that information deeply within herself, where even Ben wouldn’t be able to find it.

“And?” he asked eagerly. “What happened with the raid?”

“It failed. They stayed hidden in the cottage and someone in the main building activated the shutters.”

“Are they transitionals?”

“Yes.”

He let out a whoop of delight. Dominica couldn’t bring herself to tell him the rest of it yet, that these transitionals were untouchables. Let him enjoy the moment.

His usual virtual form, the Ben she knew, looked like a California surfer, blond and tan, with vivid blue eyes. Her usual form was a slender brunette, the beauty she had been in her Spanish life. In
brujo
time, he was relatively young and she was not.

Brujos
had the ability to travel through time, and during such a sojourn, she had found him in one of Henry Ford’s factories in 1914 and seized him as he was leaving work one evening. She used him for five months, living through him vicariously, getting a taste of life in that period. Then one day he became aware of her, thought he was losing his mind, and took a gun to his head. The gun clicked but didn’t fire, saving her from annihilation because she wouldn’t have been able to escape his body before he died. So she’d seized his brain violently as she abandoned his body, and when he’d died of a cerebral hemorrhage, she had been there, waiting for him. They had been together ever since. She felt responsible for him.

Ben remained with her tribe because he believed it was his best chance to seize a body and live out that person’s life, the ultimate goal of every
brujo.
Over time, her tribe had enjoyed some impressive successes. But it was never easy, there were no guarantees.
If
you conquered the temptations of immediate gratification,
if
you could keep the body’s personality subdued or subsume it altogether, you still inherited all the personality’s emotional baggage. And
if
you even recalled who
you
were, it was exceedingly difficult to achieve anything. The suicide rate among returns was high. The mental breakdown rate was even higher. Maybe one in five survived it.

But she and Ben were fortunate. They had experienced several such lives together. The worst was as teens, disastrously short lives that nonetheless expanded their venue. The best was a Kansas life in the 1950s, where they had spent thirty years together in physical life. They’d tasted other lives between then and now, stints as long as several years in order to study a particular time and place. Full lives, however, were rare.

“Can we take them?” he asked.

She held her hands to the heat pouring from the vents. Heat and cold for
brujos
weren’t like they were in a physical body. She felt only a phantom sensation, similar to what an amputee experienced. In the old days, when her people controlled Esperanza, their senses had been sharper. But that time was long gone and here she was, racing through cold sunlight in a vehicle that cost a ton of money in the physical world but that, here, was created from intent and desire. Chimeras, her stock-in-trade.

“Nica?”

“No, we can’t seize them. I tried, just to see if it could be done, and was hurled out.”

“What
? But . . . that’s impossible.”

Impossible, perhaps, but it had happened. “What do we know about Manuel Ortega? He drove the bus that took these transitionals to Esperanza.” She explained what had happened on the bus—and outside of it when Manuel had mocked her and turned the flamethrower on her. “I know that he works for the Posada de Esperanza, does odd jobs around Gigante. Other than that, he’s a blank.”

“I’m not familiar with him. But I’ll check into it.”

“Do we know of anyone named Charlie?”

“Last name?”

“I don’t know.” She told him about the e-mail she had found on Ed Granger’s computer.

“He sounds important in the chaser scheme of things.”

Dominica thought immediately of Nomad.
They’re protected, Nica. So
give it up. You can’t seize them.
Now that she knew Wayra could still shift, she doubted everything she thought she had known about him. Was he one of the chasers or simply a surrogate? Did the distinction even matter? Either way, he worked with them. More to the point, had she actually revised her own history?
That is only a lie you have told yourself. And over the centuries, you came to believe it was true.
Had her memories over the six hundred years of her existence betrayed her?

“So how do we get to them?” Ben asked.

“Wrong question. How did the transitionals get in? Who opened the gate? And
why?”

“We could seize Ed Granger and Sara Wells and find the answers quickly.”

“They may not have the answers. Ed Granger recognized them as transitionals, but I think he’s as mystified as we are. Besides, we’d have trouble getting into the city now. The fans will be on everywhere.” For the last ten years, since she had ordered the attacks on the city, the fans had run after every sighting, every attack, to blow away the fog in which
brujos
often traveled. “How large are we, Ben? Sixty thousand?”

“Sixty thousand, eight hundred and twenty-six as of yesterday.”

Ben, the numbers man, the tribal accountant. “And our totals?”

“Over two million, spread across the globe, but most of them concentrated in small tribes. Many of our members are still feeding off the ongoing disasters in Haiti, the Sudan, Darfur, Indonesia, you name it. As the hurricane season ramps up, they’re salivating over possibilities in the Gulf that Katrina didn’t finish off.”

Vivid picture, that. “Have you heard of
liberationblogspot.com
?”

Ben’s expression tightened, she could almost smell the fear that rolled off him. “Yes. We’re keeping tabs on them. We have
brujos
in Guayaquil who are looking for the woman who started the blog. But so far we haven’t located her. It’s difficult to know how well organized they are, but they seem to be planning something.”

“If twenty thousand humans armed with flamethrowers descended on Esperanza, Ben, we would face extinction.”

Ben flexed his fingers against the steering wheel. “All the more reason to do things my way, Nica.”

His way was to turn the tribe loose on Esperanza and every village and town north of the Río Palo, seize every resident, and once and for all turn Esperanza into a city of
brujos.
“The chasers would intervene.”

“They haven’t intervened since we began seizing people here ten years ago. I don’t think there’re enough of them to fight us. The whole playing field is different than it was during the last battle for Esperanza, Nica. We outnumber them. We’ve evolved beyond anything they ever imagined five centuries ago. If they were going to intervene, they would have done it by now.”

“Maybe the appearance of two transitionals is the first step in some new grand plan they have for defeating us.”

“How?”

“I don’t know.” She didn’t have any answers. But the chasers were up to something, this liberation group disturbed her, and the appearance of the transitionals frightened her. She suddenly felt threatened from all sides and wasn’t sure what to do, which way to turn.

Ben opened the Mercedes up wide. It tore across the barren land, tires kicking up dirt and dried brush, mile after mile of flatness until the twin peaks appeared beneath a sagging gray sky, their bases ringed by a thick, dark fog. Home, she thought, and felt depressed by the thought.

After the chasers had crushed the
brujos
in the battle five centuries ago, many of them had sought release from their existence. The chasers swept in and supposedly guided these
brujos
to other realms within the afterlife. Dominica still wasn’t sure what that meant. What other realms? The only realm she knew of was this one. The only certainty was that the battle had left most
brujos,
Dominica among them, with a deepening hatred toward the chasers and a greater hunger for physical life.

Many
brujos
had left Ecuador after that battle and journeyed out across the globe. They began to form tribes and learned how to seize bodies for physical pleasure or to familiarize themselves with the world as it marched through time.

Twenty years ago, she and Ben had returned to this barren valley, which was nearly as ugly as it was now, a flat wasteland. They had summoned
brujos
from every corner of the world, and those who had answered the call had become part of her tribe. Through their collective intentions and desires, they had erected twin peaks that rose a mile high. Then they had created their world inside of it. None of it was real in the physical sense. It was akin to a mirage, invisible to humans. But it was from here, their home base, that they had ventured for the next decade, spreading throughout South America, seizing bodies here and there. She’d always believed they hadn’t seized enough bodies in one place to attract the attention of the
chasers. But apparently they’d seized a sufficient number so that through the miracle of the Internet, victims’ families and friends had coalesced around a single purpose: to annihilate the
brujos
and take back Esperanza.

The Mercedes plunged into the fog. Ben reached up to the remote control device clipped to the visor, pressed it, and the door in the mountain slid open. He drove in, honked twice, and the door shut, sealing them within. Lights winked on in the cavern, simulating daylight in a parking lot anywhere in America or Europe. Since physical life was so coveted, great care had been taken to create an atmosphere that mimicked it. Even the other cars parked here reflected it faithfully—hybrids, trucks, sedans, SUVs, Jeeps, a couple of Smart Cars, even some electric cars. Above this parking garage were the accouterments that reflected physical life: downtowns, shops, restaurants, cafés, small businesses.