Juan of the Dead

by Jacalyn Boggs

  When the Head Honcho Duo stopped their rather raucous laughter, I glared at Jon. What a traitor. I'd get him later. He would beg me for mercy.

  Jon's translation of these guys' answer didn't thrill me any. They wanted to keep me here under lock and key. With tents, it's not so much real lock and key. Mostly just big burly bodyguard types. So, me hanging in a tent doing nothing, especially not working on my tan. A few bodyguards, and the rest would go off hunting the creepers wanting to turn me into a human puzzle.

  Now, I knew that I should be grateful that they cared. That's a whole mess of caring that I couldn't imagine. I didn't think I'd kill for anyone. In fact, I knew I wouldn't kill for anyone. Nobody is worth a lifetime in prison or the death sentence. I'm sorry, that's just how it was. So, it kind of bothered me that they wanted to kill for me. Frick and Frack, bless their souls, offered to bodyguard me.

  Why did I have a feeling they thought it was babysitting duty? Probably because I felt like it was babysitting duty. Oh, we gotta watch the poor little woman with homicidal maniacs after her.

  I wasn't so sure I liked the idea of having keepers, but then again, I did like breathing. Or at least breathing to appear normal. I could learn to deal with keepers.

  c

  chapter eighteen

  I left the boys to do their thing and went on a mental walkabout. They could dish out plans themselves. It wasn't like I had any sort of marketable skills to solve this problem. What was I going to do, Amex my hunters to death?

  The problem with letting others make the decisions for your life was that you then had to put up with what they chose, while getting bored. No Vogue to read, no one to talk to, nothing.

  It was amazing what you'd think about when you ran out of real things. I hadn't slept since Jon awoke me from the eternal dirt nap. Not sleeping meant I was going to now have twenty-four hours a day to fill. Neverwish for more hours in a day, trust me, you could totally have too many. I needed to take up a hobby.

  Jon interrupted my thoughts. “Bea, we think we have a workable solution.”

  I hoped it was better than just ruthlessly killing people. I really didn’t do well with death. Ironic, right?

  “Okies. Shoot.”

  “You're going to stay here.” He motioned for my good buddies, Frick and Frack.

  Oh good, I wanted more bonding time with the wonder twins.

  "You've got someone to watch over you. There's some good information I can get here, so I'm staying, too. Seems the Elders have more legends. Meanwhile they'll send out scouts and see if we can at least determine where this other tribe's staying. We'll try to determine what kind of threat they pose and see if we can grab someone to bring back here and prove you are all right."

  “That sounds far more reasonable.”

  At least give them the chance to talk. Shouldn't they have the right to at least defend themselves?

  If we didn't at least try, I'd have one massive guilt trip to process. Worst that could happen was we'd find they were completely unrelenting.

  “With a smaller crowd, we can have more of a dialogue. I'm hoping for some real information. Maybe we can even get some answers."

  “Think there is a 'So You Wanna Be the Undead' resource book out there? I can't imagine it to be a popular wiki hit on the net.”

  I didn't have many questions, but the ones I did have consisted of: “Will I ever die now?” and “Where was the dang light?” Okay, so the last one they probably couldn't answer, and I needed to figure it out on my own. I'd never been one to be all Bible thumping and whatnot, but it wasn't like I didn't believe in it. The thought that there was definitely nothing out there kind of made me sad. Maybe you just had to wait a while before you saw the light. I liked to hope so.

  Then again, these people probably didn't know if I was immortal, either. Barring psychos chopping me up, of course. I mean, if my new friends did know, wouldn't they have their own undead people to worry about, and they could hoist this whole chosen one shtick onto one of them?

  Many of the men stood and left the tent, off to be good little hunter boys.

  Find me a crazy person so we can find out just how off their rocker they are! Soon there were only five of us left in the tent: Jon, me, Anna-Lucia, and the Duo. Frick and Frack stood just outside.

  “I'm hoping we can find what other legends there may have been and if there's ever been another like you.”

  I felt testy. It was nice to be unique, but there came a point where you didn’t want to be that unique. Not that I wanted to know that there were more like me. A brain could only wrap itself around so much at one time.

  “Whatever.”

  If I learned I was not alone, was I supposed to go romping off to meet up with other undead people? Yay, a conclave of undead sorts. They could help me learn to live in society with my new issues. If I never aged, I was going to need to figure out how to fake people out. At the same time, what kind of people would they be? The legends I'd heard weren't very promising. Let's not even talk pop culture.

  “There's nothing? Come on,” he nudged me. I hated his nagging.

  “This is just all a lot to deal with. It's kind of bringing me down, the fact I can't talk to anyone but you and I've got some crazy people chasing me and...” I trailed off and bit my lip.

  He put his hand on my arm. “I'm really sorry... I...”

  I wasn't really paying attention to his words though I was glad for the empathy. Glad, but kind of tired. He'd done what he'd done, and it was over. No going back now. But, that's not why I wasn't paying attention. It was the electric sizzle zinging up and down my arm from his touch.

  Lucky for both of us, we had the Head Honcho Duo and Anna-Lucia, so we were able to escape the touch vortex. He removed his hand from my arm, with what I hoped was, reluctance.

  I tried to brush off his apology. “This is my... life now. Whatever. I'll just learn to deal.”

  Maybe I was too harsh. He looked upset and his hand dropped limply to his side.

  “I never meant for this. You have to know that.”

  I tried to soften my tone. I suppose he didn't think raising me from the dead would make people hot to trot to undo his work. “I know, Jon. A lots happened in the last couple of days.”

  “It sure has. Who knew?”

  “Apparently they did.” The acid was back. “Rather rude of them not to fill us in, don't ya think?”

  His eyes brightened. “I can't believe I had no idea that these people even existed.”

  Uh oh...

  We had ourselves a case of job-crush right here. He wasn't kidding when he told me about his job. He really did like this stuff. It was awful dang cute to watch him get so excited.

  “That would have been some good knowledge to have.” Thinking about things like that made my brain hurt. Kinda moot anyway since I didn't see any wild haired mad scientists with a DeLorean hanging around. No chance to go back in time and fix things.

  “Maybe.” He looked thoughtful for just a second. “I can't wait to see what more I can learn from them. Their language is very interesting.”

  “How much of that do you really understand?” I asked.

  “You don't want to know. It's pretty tough. What little I understand sounds like a mash up of what's supposed to be two different dead languages. That could be part of the problem. Maybe we've learned mispronunciations since we thought they were dead.”

  Hmm, a linguistics for dummies lesson. Fascinating. A simple “not much” would have sufficed. I could lock the useless trivia away in the back of my head. Never know when I might be on a trivia game show.

  “How many languages do you know?”

  “Really just English and Spanish. I know some bits and pieces to several dead languages, but they aren't really useful in the modern world.”

  “Like Latin? Isn't that a dead language?” For brainiacs, I mentally added.

  “Exactly. Languages that are no longer spoken are hard to learn. You can't really know for sure if you are p
ronouncing it right and there's no one to really practice

  on.”

  “I see. So that's why you said it's hard with these guys?”

  “Pretty much. Think about our language and how many different sounds a letter

  can make,” Jon explained.

  “For real. Why do we have letters that have five sounds?” I groaned. What is the point of that? For that matter why did we have words that sounded the same, but were spelled differently?

  “Exactly. We may think we have the right sound, but we could be wrong. It's kind of like how people say the same word different in the north and in the south. Same words, different sounds.”

  “Big time. I've traveled to Boston and New Orleans. It's almost like they're speaking two different languages!”

  “So, you get it. Maybe there's a little of that sort of thing going on. My sounds are off.”

  “Crap, how do you deal with that? Can't you totally misinterpret words?”

  “Yes, that's what makes it so hard. I'm really trying to concentrate.”

  “I saw you. It was pretty impressive though. It sounded like a bunch of growling to me.”

  “I bet it did. Their language is very guttural,” he chuckled.

  “It was almost more so than German. I knew some German kids in high school. Student exchanges and stuff.”

  “Yeah, in that way it is like German.”

  I realized then we were being rude. Here we were yammering away in English and our would-be good friends were just sitting there patiently. While a portion of me felt it served them right to deal with waiting around for a while, I also knew it wasn't nice.

  “We should probably get back to the task at hand.” I kind of nodded my head towards Anna-Lucia and the two guys.

  “You're right,” he agreed, clearing his throat. He turned to Anna-Lucia himself and said something in Spanish. I'm sure it was probably a brief explanation of what we'd been discussing. She replied and he nodded toward her. She then turned to the guys behind her and said something.

  “What do you plan to ask, Jon?” Maybe I could get some ideas to help.

  “I've got some things I want to see if they can translate for me. From where I found the instructions dealing with how to...”

  “Make me what I am? Do you really think they'll know how to translate that?” I was skeptical. These guys were from South America and I wondered how similar the languages could be with that kind of mileage between the two areas. Then again, these people spoke some ancient mix up of dialects, so I guess anything was possible.

  “I don't know. Maybe not. It's not the same language. Well, there are roots that are similar. I don't know if it's something like how languages like French, Spanish, and Italian are similar because of their Latin roots.”

  “Okay. My big question, do these people have names?”

  “Do you think that's important?”

  “I can't be calling them 'hey you' now can I?” Okay, I suppose since I couldn't talk to them at all, I wouldn't be calling them anything. But that's a moot point. I wanted something better in my head.

  “Good point,” Jon said. He went out and a few minutes later he came back with names. Thank goodness.

  Turns out the Duo Lefty was Mac, or at least that's what it sounded like to me. Good enough. Duo Righty was Glen. That seemed normal enough. Frick and Frack, wherever they'd vanished to, were names so unpronounceable that I decided I had to shorten them. I got Raul and Don in my attempt. There were some other sounds in there, but Raul and Don would work just fine.

  At least now if I needed something, I could call for them. Surely, they could understand simple pantomimes. No clue which was which, but there'd be plenty of time for that later. Jon was still speaking with Anna-Lucia. He looked rather animated and I figured that meant he must be talking geek with her. He stopped in what sounded like the middle of a sentence. After a brief moment, he started back up waving his hands like a loon. I watched with an arched eyebrow mildly amused.

  He turned back to me, his face a flush.

  Oh dear, this was going to be interesting.

  “You aren't going to believe this!”

  “My belief system is changing,” I stated. “You'd be surprised what I believe in now.” Like death is not the end? That's one.

  “These people want to take us back to South America.”

  I cut him off before he could start another nerd ramble. “I don't know about that. Seems kind of problematic.”

  Besides, what were they planning to do? These are people who abducted us in the first place. What if they were lying about the other people? Maybe there were no other people hunting me. It could all be a ploy to get me back to their village and... I don't know. Whatever people like them would do to people like me.

  “No, not right now,” Jon clarified. “Later. Once we've straightened out the mess we're in.”

  “I'd like to point out that there's an even bigger mess. Like the fact I have no ID. No ID means no crossing borders. Just how do they plan to smuggle me through without a passport?”

  “I don't think they have passports, Bea.”

  Oh great, now he was going to treat me like I was stupid. “But wouldn't it be better for me to try to get some sort of identification? If they take me elsewhere, how am I going to explain my presence there? Won't it make it worse for me to go home?”

  He thought for a moment. “I don't know. We're going to have to make something up anyway. Here or there.”

  “What's there to make up here. I was on a cruise, there was an earthquake, I missed my ride. That's easy enough to track. Why do you want to go so bad?” I asked. My eyes narrowed as I looked at him.

  Me playing hopscotch through various countries could not have been what got him all excited. Men like that get excited at one of two things: Naked women and whatever their sicko obsession might be.

  “They have records, it's how they knew to come here. They have ancient sites and artifacts. That's what I do. I can use all of that to learn from.”

  Why was I not surprised? He could go to another country and dig around with the stuff of people long dead. He did love the dusty and the musty.

  “Yeah, but I say we just stay here. Or at least head to some major city where maybe I can find some help to get back home.” Call me Dorothy. There's no place like home. It's not just where the heart is. It's where a girl belongs.

  “But this is the opportunity of a lifetime. And they really want you. I don't think you have anything back home that can compare with what they want to give you.”

  Goes to show what he knew. I had a closet of beautiful clothes bearing the names of my most favorite people like Christian Louboutin, Oscar de la Renta, and Dooney & Burke. Scores of beautiful shoes and handbags. My job, my friends, my family. My Caribou Coffee, where I could get all manner of yummy drinks. Television, movies, my car.

  “Humph.” I crossed my arms. “I highly doubt it.”

  “They will take care of your every need. They were not kidding about that whole worshipping you and thinking that you will do so many great things for them. You're gonna blow that off?”

  I had a higher standard of living than him. He obviously didn't mind living in squalor in the back end of nowhere. I needed to live somewhere where people lived, and things were close at hand and I could have my creature comforts.

  I liked where I lived. I wanted nothing more than to stay there. Moving wasn't really in my plans, and especially not to someplace like this. I'm sure where they wanted to take me wasn't much different. This wasn't even a nice place to visit, I didn't want to live here.

  “No, I want to go home. Get on with my life,” I insisted.

  “We might be able to make that happen,” Jon sighed. “But this is the opportunity of a lifetime to learn more about what's happened with you. How it works, and why you are so special.”

  I didn't like it. Seemed like it was going to cause more trouble. Story of my life these days. I stepped foot in Mexico and lost control of my li
fe. “Okay, I'll think about it.”

  “I'll let them know we're going.”

  The hell? What was that? “I didn't say that!” I barked.

  “You can think about it while we travel. It'll be fine,” he shrugged.

  “You can go dig in your artifacts and ancient whatever. How about you text me when you figure it all out? See this could easily work with me going home.”

  “Not really. You should stay with us. What if we find out we need to do something and you aren't around?”

  “Like what?” I knew he was pretty vague on what really happened, a fact that still bugged me. How can someone do something like this without knowing what was going on? But still, surely, he should have known something. Didn't stuff like this come with disclaimers like, “Batteries not included” and “Don't feed after midnight”? Turned out, no. A testament to the need for keeping good records.

  Frick came into the tent. I wondered which one he was, Raul or Don? He held a tray made of rough wood. While it was simple in design, it was beautiful. You just didn't get craftsmanship like that anymore. Forget slave labor in China, we just discovered the new place for American goods to come from. I'd love to order up a few of those trays for Christmas gifts.

  On top of the tray was sliced fruit. They'd be mouthwatering if I had an appetite. Too bad I didn't, they smelled wonderful. Along with the fruit, I saw some bowls. Interestingly enough, there was one for everyone except for me, if we counted Raul and Don. Frak followed right behind with bread.

  I felt a little envious at that moment. The delightful aromas of the food almost tempted me to try eating. I really needed to figure out what was going on with that. I gave it a shot.

  “Jon? Do you think they know what the deal is with my whole lack of hunger and thirst thing? Or any of the other things going on with me?”

  Maybe they were witchdoctors, but I didn’t think a standard MD could really know what to do with a case like mine. Anything that I could get from them would be helpful in this regard.