Esperanza (56 page)

His eyes flooded with incredulity, hope, then gratitude and love. “Slim?”

As they moved toward each other, figures in a dream, Tess was vaguely aware of the hush that settled through the air, that the other passengers watched them. Then none of it mattered, his arms tightened around her, he was real, achingly real. He buried his face in the curve of her neck, said her name again. He ran his fingers through her singed white hair, kissed the ash from her mouth, explored her face with his eyes and fingers as if to divine her journey to this moment.

Behind them, applause and cheers erupted from the other passengers.

Dominica and her tribe knew the so-called liberators were on their way and that they numbered in the thousands. Even so, the sheer number of buses, trucks, cars, and SUVs that poured into the city shocked her.

Snipers, positioned on rooftops, in trees, in windows high above the streets, opened up as the first wave of vehicles entered El Corazón. Windshields shattered, tires blew, vehicles ran amok as their drivers were killed, other vehicles were overturned and set on fire. The human idiots stumbled out into the streets, across the parks, only to be mowed down. Great, billowing clouds of black, greasy smoke rolled through the streets.

She stood on a rooftop in her host body, a nobody female bureaucrat in the Esperanza scheme of things. From here, she had a panoramic view of the city and could see the weaknesses in their defenses. So she threw up her arms and summoned the fog, just as she had in San Francisco. It tumbled in from every direction, filling the streets, rising against the buildings,
reducing visibility to zero. The hungry ghosts inside shrieked and chanted,
Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body
. . . The sounds sliced through the screams of the invaders. And then the fog swallowed entire blocks, sped up the trunks of trees, covered the tops of buildings like an intricate white lace, and moved with incredible swiftness toward the next ring of vehicles.

Her tribe had prevailed for ten years through intimidation and terror but now terror wasn’t enough. Fearless men and women armed with flamethrowers, guns, rifles, grenades, and homemade explosives swept up and down the streets of El Corazón, forcing her tribe to fight in a way that was foreign to them. Hand to hand, face to face.
Brujos
in their host bodies fell like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. Blockades were breached and the armada of vehicles tore on through the city, horns blaring, flames shooting from windows and open doors.

Enraged, Dominica commanded a thousand host bodies to close off the city to the south and west and summoned a second, darker fog to block the eastern and northern boundaries of the city. Everywhere she looked, in every corner of the city, fires blazed, smoke and fog mixed with the cacophony of battle, the screams and moans of the dying. But the humans kept on coming—Ecuadorians, Argentineans, Chileans, Venezuelans, Brazilians, Colombians, pouring into Esperanza like some sort of plague. In every country where her tribe had seized someone since they had constructed the twin peaks twenty years ago, they had fostered the enmity of countless humans, and here they were, eager for blood, victory, freedom, revenge.

Karma.
Dominica sent out a call to Rafael, requesting that he dispatch a thousand of his special followers to the northern edge of the city so that the avengers couldn’t fan out through the countryside. These followers had seized the strongest men and women in Esperanza, street fighters who had battled
brujos
for years. It was only fitting that now they would kill their fellow humans.

Suddenly, she felt it, that hum, that auditory beacon that was the mark on Tess’s arm, and she leaped out of her silly human body, left the bureaucrat stumbling around on a rooftop, confused and terrified, and swept toward the sound. It led her to one bus among many that barreled through Esperanza, flames shooting from its windows, its rooftop. She came up behind it and entered through the rear door, the only unguarded spot, safe from the flames.

The diversity of humans shocked her—white, black, brown, indigenous,
all of them armed, doing their part to annihilate her tribe. She moved among them to the front of the bus where Ian drove madly, Wayra shouted directions, and several dozen people, including Tess, her mother and niece, fired from windows, the open door.

Dominica seized an Argentinean woman next to Maddie. The moment Dominica was inside of her, she knew this woman’s cousin had been seized by a
brujo
four years ago in Buenos Aires, and the young man had bled out.
Oops, sorry. Time to join him.
And suddenly the woman shrieked and her eyes started to bleed as she stumbled blindly through the bus.

Maddie scrambled away, yelling,
They’re here, in the bus,
and Dominica leaped into a middle-aged man, an Otavaleño with a graying
shimba
that fell to his waist. A pair of
brujos
had taken his parents, proprietors of a leather shop in Otavalo, and had bled them out two days after seizing them. Now he lusted for vengeance. Dominica had underestimated the passion for revenge among humans. Didn’t matter. She squeezed his brain, he started to bleed, squealing like a dying pig, and she jumped out of him.

The chaos and terror inside the bus reached epidemic proportions. Passengers shouted, the bus swerved through the streets, and Wayra leaped up from his seat—and shifted. Did it right there in front of everyone, nothing hidden, no camouflage, no grace, just the transformation, man to dog or wolf or whatever the hell he was. Then he hurled himself at her, but without snarls, howls, or drama.

His powerful legs slammed into her and the next thing she knew, they were on the beach of the Lago del Sueño.

Ian saw Wayra shoot to his feet, then he transformed at the speed of light, and Nomad leaped toward something that only he could see—and vanished. After that, Ian drove like a man possessed, shouts rising throughout the bus for towels, blankets, something with which to cover the dead.

Another roadblock loomed just ahead, large refrigerated trucks parked across the road, several dozen snipers on top of them firing at everything that approached. Ian couldn’t tell if the snipers were host bodies or virtual forms, but the distinction no longer mattered. “Slim, grab a couple of grenades,” he shouted. “Get up to the rooftop and blast those fucks to the Stone Age. I’m going to their right, over the sidewalk, where the smoke is thickest.”

“Done.”

He watched her briefly in the rearview mirror, tearing down the aisle,
her burned white hair flopping around. At the back of the bus, Ian saw Maddie already gathering up grenades from the bin of weapons. Then both women clambered up the ladder to the rooftop and vanished from his sight. It scared him, that he couldn’t see her anymore.

Fog now moved around the blockade of refrigerated trucks in front of him. Firelight turned the stuff an eerie pumpkin orange. He sensed the brujos waiting within, could hear their whisperings again, that sound like sandpaper drawn across satin, grating yet slippery and soft.

Ian slammed his foot against the accelerator, shifted gears, and the bus tore over the curb and barreled up the sidewalk, crashing through tables and chairs and anything else in the way. The fog rushed toward them, that terrifying chant reached out to them. Ian hollered,
“Flamethrowers, fast!”

Flames blasted from the windows, the rooftop. The fog recoiled swiftly, but the snipers on top of the refrigerated trucks kept shooting. The smoke, so thick and dark and oppressive, offered excellent cover, and before they sped out on the other side of it, two refrigerated trucks went up. Grenades, he thought. Tess and Maddie had hit their marks.

The explosion hurled flaming debris fifty feet into the air and spewed it in every direction. Stuff rained down around them, chunks of metal and pieces of bodies slammed into the top of the bus. Maddie and Tess reappeared and hurried back up the aisle armed with flamethrowers again.

Ian pressed a button on the dashboard and a shield covered the front windshield, with a four-inch horizontal opening that allowed him to see the road. Another button raised shields along the side windows, but left enough open space for weapons to be extended. Then he gunned the accelerator, shifted gears, and the bus tore free of the smoke. The air echoed with gunfire, explosions, the shriek of sirens. It sounded like Armageddon.

He slammed on the brakes, the engine racing, staring at the road ahead. He recognized it. It was the one he’d followed out of the city when Juanito was so badly injured. The church where he and Tess had spent their last hour as transitionals lay some distance beyond it. The same church where Illika, Juanito, and others were trapped. One way or another, he would get there.

But first, he had to take the bus through the army of host bodies that occupied the road as far as he could see. Men and women, even teenagers, stood shoulder to shoulder, armed with guns, machetes, pitchforks, rifles, assault weapons.

He had no idea how the
brujos
had gathered so many weapons. But he understood
this
strategy: put a human face on the enemy. March out the strongest host bodies, all of them locals, most of them Ecuadorians, and dare the avengers to kill their Latino brothers and sisters.

Vehicles lined both sides of the road—more refrigerated trucks, vans, cars, all with headlights blazing. Ian suspected that if he and the cars and buses behind him dared to slam through the army of host bodies, these vehicles would pursue them to the gates of hell.

“How many buses and cars are behind us?” Ian asked Tess.

“Dozens.”

He radioed the drivers of several other buses, and within moments, vehicles lined up on either side of him, engines revving.
“Assume positions,”
he shouted. “We’re going first and we’ll shoot straight through them. They’re heavily armed. Anyone who wants to get down on the floor, do so now.”

No one moved to the floor.

“End the
brujo
tyranny!” shouted someone at the back of the bus, and the chant went up.

Ian looked at Tess and mouthed,
I love you.

Tess’s beautiful eyes latched on to his.
Back at you, bigger than Google,
she mouthed. Then she, Lauren, and Maddie moved back to their seats, flamethrowers ready.

He revved the engine once more, a signal to the other vehicles, then released the emergency brake, and the bus sprang forward.

Tess didn’t know how long it took to slam through all the host bodies that filled the road. Seconds, hours, days. But she felt every horrifying thump, every shriek of agony, every
brujo
annihilation. When flames shot from her weapon, she smelled the burning of clothes, hair, skin, and saw the survivors scattering, fire leaping from their backs and legs and heads.

Trucks and cars exploded, but other vehicles careened away and vanished into the dark countryside. Pieces of smoldering metal fell from the sky.
Thump, thump, thump,
went the bodies that hit the bus, each thump interspersed with a hail of gunshots, knives, machetes.

Just as her flamethrower ran out of fuel, they broke free of the host army, and the bus shot up the road. But vehicles pursued them, and fog tumbled toward them from both sides of the road and quickly grew into a wall.

“Grenades!” Tess shouted.

Moments later, four quick and furious detonations on both sides of the bus set trees ablaze, forcing the fog back, and the road opened up in front of them.

But for how long?

The fog chased them for miles, closing in, backing off, closing in again. Then it rolled over the bus, swallowing it completely, and the insidious whispers filled the air,
Find the body, fuel the body
. . .

“Make sure the fog isn’t getting in through the windows and doors,” Ian shouted.

Tess shot to her feet, but suddenly, through the horizontal slit in the windshield, she spotted lights moving against the distant horizon, dozens of them in formation.
Choppers.
Their brilliant searchlights swept across the landscape, then great furious bursts of fire exploded beneath them. The fog rolled away so fast it was as if it never had been there.

“Look,” she hollered, pointing. “Remove the shields from the windows, Ian.”

As he did, everyone on the bus saw the lights, the choppers, their firebombs plunging from the sky. Excited cheers and shouts reverberated through the bus.

Ed Granger had finally come through. Tess didn’t have any idea how he’d done it, what strings he’d pulled, what favors he’d called in, or how he had convinced the pilots to fly into the city at night. But he apparently realized that the liberation of Esperanza was going to happen with or without him, and had done the right thing.

Lauren and Maddie made their way forward and threw their arms around Tess, Ian, around each other. Then Ian swerved down the church’s driveway, blasting the horn, and glanced over at Tess. “Do you remember this?”

“Yeah. Last time I was driving,” she said, and he laughed and the garage door began to rise.

Once Dominica and Nomad were inside the mysterious cave at the edge of the lake, he became a man once more, Wayra so tall that he couldn’t stand upright. They regarded each other with open wariness, their long and convoluted history a presence between them. She took solace from the tea-colored eyes of the man she’d loved so long ago and hoped that man still existed somewhere inside of him. Then those eyes darkened with rage.