Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Ian was still on the phone when Juanito suddenly shouted his name. He turned to see the man collapse across the roof of the truck, arms flopping like a fish out of water. Alarmed, Ian snapped the cell shut and ran over to him, caught him just as he began to slide off the truck, leaving behind streaks of blood.

  Blood poured from his nostrils, rolled from the corners of his eyes, and left a warm, sticky trail from his mouth to his chin. Ian got him into the truck and Juanito slumped against the passenger window, chest heaving as he struggled for breath, mouth moving, trying to form words.

  “It’s okay, don’t try to talk.” Ian ran around to the driver’s side, slipped behind the wheel. “I’m getting you to a hospital.”

  “No. I can . . . deal with this. Get to Manuel . . . the others.”

  “What happened, Juanito? Was it a brujo?”

  “. . . seized me . . . I drove her . . . out . . . But she managed . . . to injure me . . . as she left.”

  Ian started the truck and screeched away from the curb so fast he nearly plowed into an oncoming car. The cell rang, he grabbed it off the seat. “Tess?”

  “It’s Manuel. What happened? I heard Juanito shouting your name, then we lost the connection.”

  “He’s bleeding.” Ian repeated what Juanito had told him.

  “Is he conscious?”

  Ian looked over at Juanito. “Barely. Where’s the nearest hospital?”

  “We can treat him here. He knows what to do until you get him here, Ian. This has happened to him before. Stay on the same road for about ten miles, until you reach Calle Lima. Take a right, go six miles. You’ll see Saint Francis Church on your left, on the corner. Go down the driveway, blaring the horn. Charge through any fog you encounter. That’s important. Don’t stop, don’t slow down, keep the windows up. The door will rise, drive into the garage. Are you in Juanito’s truck?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. He has special seals on the windows, the vents.”

  “He’s bleeding badly.”

  “Trust me. He knows what to do.”

  The line went dead, Ian floored the accelerator, and the truck shot forward. He drove like a maniac, tearing through stoplights, swerving in between other cars until he was outside of the city. Traffic thinned, the countryside opened up to hills and fields where banks of fog climbed toward the sky as if to swallow it. White and gray fog swirled around trees like cotton candy around a stick and rolled toward him from every direction. Somewhere behind him, sirens shrieked.

  Juanito coughed, deep, wet, racking coughs. “They’re trying . . . to intimidate you . . . they want you . . . to freak out . . . to . . . lose control, Ian.”

  “Fat chance.”

  He opened the truck up as wide as it would go. The speedometer needle swung past eighty and the old truck tore up the road, bouncing and clattering until it sounded as if it were falling apart. The needle climbed, the truck was running on empty, the gas light glowed red.

  Shit.

  Then the truck plunged into the fog. The stuff clung to the glass, pressing so tightly against it that Ian felt it was trying to merge with the glass, to pass through it. A tight, eerie silence claimed the air, a vacuum begging to be filled. Within seconds, the insidious whispering started and quickly escalated into that eerie chant: find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body. He slapped a hand over one ear, gripped the steering wheel with his other hand, but it wasn’t enough. He felt as if he were chewing on glass, as if red-hot pokers were being thrust through his eyes, his ears, down the back of his skull. The high-pitched chant nauseated him, he couldn’t breathe, he started sweating, the world briefly blurred.

  “Radio,” Juanito rasped. “Turn it on. Music. Loud.”

  He hit the on button and spun the volume dial as high as it would go. In the cottage when this had happened, Tess had known instinctively to shriek, that it would drown out the keening. Now the music hammered through the truck, a Latin beat and a female singer whose shrill voice could shatter crystal. It drowned out the worst of the chanting. But the fog was so thick, visibility had shrunk to a foot.

  “Turn,” Juanito shouted, gesturing wildly with his bloody hand. “Left. Fast.”

  Ian swung into a left turn, tires screeching against the pavement. The truck fishtailed and slammed down over roots, brush, rocks. He corrected slightly to the right and they raced on through the ever-thickening fog. He detected the vague shapes of buildings, but couldn’t see any street signs, intersections, landmarks that might tell him where the church was. He glanced quickly at Juanito, but he had passed out.

  Ian tapped the brake, struggled to see through the fog. His head ached in rhythm to the loud, pounding music. But he was terrified that if he turned down the volume, he would hear the chanting. That would be worse.

  The cell vibrated against his leg and he swept it up and was forced to lower the radio’s volume in order to hear Tess’s voice, a lifeline.

  “Ian, I’m about to pull out into the road, so you’ll know where to turn for the church. Where are you?”

  The chanting now sounded like a high-pitched electric saw that was slicing its way through his jaw, teeth, skull. “I made the turn half a mile ago. I’m slowing down, may run out of gas. I have to turn the music back up or I’m going to pass out. That chanting, Slim, that godawful chanting.”

  He dropped the cell on the seat, cranked up the radio’s volume. He was now running on fumes, and leaned forward, desperately searching the fog directly in front of him, willing the truck to make it to the church before the tank went totally dry.

  Inside the garage under the church, Tess readied herself. She felt like a Nascar driver, suited up, primed, with Manuel and Sara Wells and Illika Huicho snapping directions. Do this, do that, bring them in. Sara looked like a California girl, all blond and pretty and in charge of—well, something. Illika seemed ancient, a century old, dark eyes trapped in a chaos of deep wrinkles, her face definitely that of the Quechuans she ruled.

  “Wayra will be with you,” Illika said, thrusting a headset into Tess’s hands. “Follow his directions.”

  “Do whatever you must to bring in Ian and Juanito,” said Sara Wells.

  Manuel slipped his arms around Tess. That crushing sense of familiarity consumed her, that she knew him, that he was not just Manuel the inn employee, the man who had driven her and Ian and Nomad to Esperanza, that they were all something else. “Bring them in safely,” Manuel whispered, his breath warm against the side of her face.

  “I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought I couldn’t succeed,” she said, and extricated herself from all of them and climbed into a Hummer, the behemoth that Manuel had referred to as their brujomobile. Wayra slid into the passenger seat. She still felt weird about him, about Nomad as a man, but was grateful for his company.

  As the door of the church’s underground garage clattered upward, the large fans that stood on either side blew away the swirling fog. Tess gunned the Hummer’s accelerator and it roared up the ramp and out into the road, fast, powerful and sealed against the intrusion of fog. The flip of a switch on the dashboard activated an electromagnetic field around the vehicle that supposedly would repel any brujo that attempted to get inside.

  She turned up the road, headlights burning a narrow path through the thick, darkening fog. The chanting rose now, a distant, menacing sound, and she slipped on a headpiece that blocked it entirely. Through her left ear, she listened to music from the CD player. Through her right, she heard Wayra’s voice, directing her through the fog.

  He sat slightly forward in the passenger seat, this tall, slender man with Nomad’s tea-colored eyes that could see what she could not. They’re lurching about in the fog, we’ve thrown them off. On your right, a deer. A rhino at two o’clock. These things aren’t real. They’re conjuring; they’re terrified, trying to throw you off.

  “Wayra, I need to know something.”

  “Drive. Slowly. Carefully.”

  “Why are you helping me
and Ian?”

  He looked at her—the face of an Olympian god, the eyes of a dog that were indescribably sad, tragic. “Because the two of you are our last, best hope.”

  “Our. Who?”

  “The light chasers, the transitionals, Esperanza. There’s—”

  Static erupted in her headpiece. Where there had been music in her left ear there was now a menacing female voice. “Wayra, Wayra, so many lies. You want her help, but you tell her lies. You’re in a coma, Tess Livingston. You were shot during a sting. Your friend Ian had a heart attack. You’re the first transitional souls here in five centuries. That scar on your thigh? That’s where you were shot. Everything you have experienced here is supplied by your imagination. Your soul is in flux, not here, not there, and you’re being used by the chasers to—”

  Wayra tore away her headpiece and hurled it into the back seat. Tess slammed on the brakes. “Who the hell was that?”

  The fog closed in on them, a living, breathing mass of organic material that throbbed like a heart, spoke in tongues, pressed up against the Hummer’s windows with a terrifying hunger. Wayra hurled open the passenger door, hopped out, kicked the door shut and yelled, “Show yourself, Nica.”

  But not to me. Tess drove on recklessly, too fast, unable to see, the horrifying chant rising again, find the body, fuel the body . . . Suddenly, inexplicably, a truck was in front of her. Real or conjured? She didn’t know. She swerved violently to the right, but the truck veered in the same direction and they crashed head-on. The impact jarred her and crumpled the truck’s front end like an accordion.

  The Hummer’s engine died, she slammed it into park, leaped out and ran over to the truck. I can run, I’m breathing, I’m scared, I’m not in any coma. But she felt as if she were trapped in a nightmare, the fog engulfing her, that high-pitched wailing piercing her to the bone. Ian was already out of the truck, hands pressed over his ears as he stumbled to the passenger side. “Help me get Juanito out,” he shouted.

  Juanito was unconscious, his face covered in dried blood. Ian pulled him out of the truck, Tess grabbed his feet, and they carried him to the Hummer, the sounds now so painful that she felt nauseated, weak, her breath trapped in her chest. Ian wasn’t faring any better. By the time they got Juanito into the back seat, Ian’s face was the color of day-old bread, he could barely stand. She grabbed the headset off the seat and shouted at him to put it on. As soon as they were inside the Hummer, she turned the radio to full blast and started shrieking and singing as she had done in the cottage.

  Then the piercing sounds abruptly stopped, but the fog kept rolling over the Hummer, hugging the sides as if to carry it away. Ian whipped off the headset, Tess turned down the radio volume.

  “Like before, Slim. The silence.”

  “We’ll get out of here.” She started the Hummer and backed away from the crumpled truck.

  “I think we’re in comas, you and I,” he said, then a disconnected story spilled from him—what Paco Faraday had told him, what he had learned at the Incan Café, how he believed that Esperanza might already be a city of brujos.

  It alarmed her—not because he sounded crazy or that she believed him, but because she suddenly understood why he was so flummoxed by his discoveries in the café.

  “Ian, what’s a DVD player?”

  “A what?”

  “What’s Wi-Fi?”

  “Wi-Fi. There was a sign at the café about Wi-Fi. But I don’t know what it is.”

  “What’s an iPod? BlackBerry? CD? Laptop? Windows? PC? MacBook?”

  He looked terrified and shook his head.

  “Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Stephen King? George Lucas? Indiana Jones? E.T.?”

  “Never heard of them.”

  Jesus. “What year is it?”

  He thought a moment. “Nineteen sixty-eight.”

  “Dear God,” she whispered.

  “Is that the wrong answer or something?”

  “No.” She tightened her hands on the steering wheel, blinked back the hot sting of tears. “Has Nixon won the election yet? Have they assassinated Bobby Kennedy? He leaves the planet on June 5, 1968, the Ambassador Hotel, L.A. Or Martin Luther King? April 4, 1968. The Lorraine Hotel in Memphis. What about My Lai? You know about My Lai?”

  “I . . . don’t know what you’re talking about, Slim.”

  She cited dates, events, situations, driven by a fierce urgency to get as much said as quickly as possible. Already, she felt her consciousness flickering, and once again, she thought she heard her mother calling to her. “Ian, for me, it’s 2008. Forty years in your future.”

  He looked as if he’d been punched in the stomach, eyes bulging, his pallor so extreme now that she sensed their time here was nearly done. A kind of strange acceptance coursed through her. “Palo means stick, Ian. The Río Palo translates as Stick River or—”

  “The river Styx,” he whispered. “Slim, in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the river Styx separates the world of the dead from the world of the living. It’s the bardo where the soul takes inventory. Hello, who the hell am I and what am I doing here?”

  From the back seat came coughing, that wet, hacking cough that could mean Juanito was drowning in his own blood. Tess drove faster, certain that if she stopped here, the thick, ubiquitous fog would enter the Hummer and consume them all.

  Through an opening in the fog, she spotted the church just ahead and turned erratically toward it, horn squealing. The door started to rise, the fog thickened, a tsunami that just kept rising, higher and higher, until it covered the roof of the church. Tess raced into the garage, a bank of fog pursuing them.

  He and Tess flung their doors open simultaneously and stumbled out of the vehicle. Ian felt weak, dizzy, used up, and made his way toward Tess by using the car for support. Confusion everywhere, people shouting, firing questions, a crowd tightening around them, no one in charge. Two men lifted Juanito onto a stretcher and carried him through double doors.

  When Ian reached Tess, he slipped his arm around her shoulders and they leaned into each other like cripples. Her face looked ashen, her smile seemed weak, unfocused, as if she couldn’t quite remember who he was.

  “Let’s get out of here, Slim,” he whispered.

  “Through those double doors. Into the bunker beneath the church. Can we make it?”

  “If we hold on to each other.”

  “I feel like I’m two hundred years old, Ian.”

  “I think . . . we don’t have much time left here. One way or another I’ll find you again.”

  She threw her arms around him, holding him, burying her face in the curve of his neck, and he shut his eyes. The rest of the world went away.

  The next thing he knew, he and Tess were sitting on a couch in a softly lit room with Manuel, an elderly Quechua woman, and a woman he recognized from the article he had read on Esperanza. “I know you,” he burst out. “Sara Wells, cultural anthropologist from Berkeley. Won a Fulbright in the late sixties to study the brujos in Ecuador. Believed to have disappeared somewhere in the Andes. Presumed dead. What was the year, exactly?”

  The astonishment on her face spoke tomes about the lengths people had gone to in order to keep him and Tess away from information. “My last contact with my old life was on May 16, 1969, Mr. Ritter. When I called my sister from Quito.” She looked quickly at Manuel. “Will he remember that?”

  She spoke as though Ian were no longer in the room. He resented it.

  “Unknown,” Manuel replied, and gestured at the bottles of water on the coffee table in front of them. “Keep drinking water. It’ll buy us a few more minutes. If you both remember what has happened to you here and if you can make it back to Esperanza, you’ll be able to be together despite your separation in time.”

  “How?” Tess asked.

  Ian held tightly to her hand, but already it faded, flickered, brightened again.

  “Because Esperanza exists both within and outside of time as we know it,” the old woman said.

  “Wayra
got left outside,” Tess said suddenly, her voice hoarse, thick.

  “He’s preventing the brujos from following you,” Sara said. “We hope to keep them from following you back to your physical bodies.”

  “But if they find you,” Manuel went on, “we won’t be able to protect you as we have here. They still won’t be able to seize you, but they can seize others and force them to kill you.”

  “But . . . this isn’t our battle,” Ian protested. “It isn’t . . .”

  Tess’s body suddenly turned transparent, and for a single, horrifying moment, Ian could see the water she was drinking as it moved down her gullet, into her stomach. He wrenched back. “What . . . what’s happening . . .”

  She started choking. Ian leaped up and slapped her on the back, but his hands went through her. He could see his flesh inside hers, his hands inside her organs. Then Manuel thrust himself between them and wrapped his arms around Tess.

  “What’re you doing?” Ian shouted, stumbling back, his legs so weak that his knees buckled and he struck the floor.

  Sara crouched in front of him, leaning in so close he caught the honeysuckle scent of her skin and hair. “Remember, Ian. Remember everything.”

  Red poured across his vision. He could still hear Tess choking, Manuel speaking to her, the words garbled, a thunderous roar echoing in his head. He lurched to his feet to get to Tess. But as he did so, Manuel’s body shredded apart like Kleenex. An arm, a leg, gone. A shoulder struck the floor and disappeared. His head fell away. And then a man with white hair and Ben Franklin glasses held her in his arms. A huge smile lit up Tess’s face.

  “Dad?” she said. “Is it really you?”

  Ian gaped. Was Manuel the virtual form of Tess’s dead father, Charlie Livingston?

  His vision went black and he felt himself falling, a meteorite hurtling toward earth, burning as it plunged through the atmosphere. Then there was only the soft, fading echo of a distant howling.