Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  “It was reported by the brujos who followed Ian Ritter.”

  “Pearl, tell Rafael my new instructions. Then take a group to 1968. Find Wayra and the American. They’re to be brought to me, just two men. Surely we can capture two men.”

  Then she slipped into Dan and tweaked his brain chemistry so that he began to emerge from his deep, Snow White sleep. His eyes opened, enabling her to look around. She sensed that Pearl was gone. You’re now going to rent a car, Dan, and you’re going to drive very fast for a very long time. Pack your things.

  “Damn, how long did I sleep?” He rubbed his hands over his face.

  Do you want to find Tess or not?

  He scrambled to his feet and spun around the room, certain that someone was here with him. Dominica decided she liked him much better when he just went along with her suggestions. She hoped she would not have to demonstrate what would happen to him if he misbehaved.

  Well? she asked.

  Dan stumbled into the bathroom, certain he was losing his mind. He splashed water on his face, leaned close to the mirror, staring at himself. “Must be coming down with something.”

  Other than the effects of the altitude, your body is quite healthy.

  He staggered back from the sink, genuinely scared now, waves of panic crashing over him. Dominica quickly adjusted his pituitary, releasing a flood of endorphins, and within minutes he began to calm down and talked quietly to himself. “Hey, man, it’s okay. You’re just zapped by the altitude. Got to drink a lot of water, have a bite to eat.”

  Excellent suggestions. Buy something on the way. We need to rent the car fast, so we have at least four hours of driving before the sun goes down. Once we’re on the road, you’ll call Tess’s cell and we’ll try to get a fix on her.

  He returned to the bedroom, packed, checked to make sure his cell was powered up, then punched out Tess’s number. He reached her voice mail, left a message, and checked out of the hotel. Dominica directed him to a car rental agency, and thirty minutes later they were on the road. He stopped once at a roadside store to buy water, a vegetarian sandwich. By the time they reached Ibarra, it was two-thirty in the afternoon. It would be dark by six, and because they were practically on the equator, the sun wouldn’t rise for twelve hours. Too long. She had to get him into the higher mountains before then.

  She instructed him to enter a general store in Ibarra and buy a host of items that would enable him to cook and eat by the side of the road and to sleep in the car. Pleased with her own planning, she dispersed herself throughout his cells, where she could think about Wayra, and how deeply he had betrayed her this time.

  Twenty-four

  MAY 1968/JUNE 2008

  The truck climbed steadily into the mountains outside Otavalo. Ian’s ears popped every few hundred feet, but otherwise the increase in altitude didn’t bother him. The road did, though. Pitted with holes, mostly dirt and stones, it was hardly fit for the donkeys and wooden carts they passed. He worried that the next hole they slammed across might take out the exhaust pipe, an axle, a tire.

  He poured water onto a towel and dabbed at his hands. They were badly scraped, the result of stones and branches and thorns and Christ knew what else that he had run across as a dog. A dog. Yeah, like he could put that into any kind of perspective.

  The cool, sweet-smelling mountain air blew through the open windows. The radio was on, music fading in and out because the mountains interfered with the reception. Wayra sometimes hummed along or tapped his fingers and thumbs against the steering wheel. They had said only a few words to each other since they’d left Otavalo hours ago. Ian finally broke the impasse.

  “Ed Granger or Juanito or someone told me you used to run with the brujos. Is that true?”

  “You remember that? You remember them?” He looked over at Ian, his eyes intense, a pale amber, like Nomad’s eyes.

  “Yeah, I remember them.”

  “Interesting. Tess remembered nothing for months.”

  “You’ve seen her?”

  “No. That’s what I heard from others.”

  “What else have you heard?” Does she remember me? “Is she trying to return?”

  “She’s on her way, with her mother and niece, but the brujos know it and are after her just as they are after us.”

  “How can you even be here? We first saw you outside the bodega in 2008.”

  “I have a limited ability to move around in time.”

  “As Nomad?”

  “In both forms. But I prefer my Nomad form. It’s cleaner, simpler, and a much richer sensory existence.”

  “So are you a dog or a wolf?”

  “Both. The shifter that bit me was half wolf, so I guess that makes me a quarter wolf. Or something. Whatever. I’m a hybrid.”

  Lock me up. “Am I still locked up in the psych ward?”

  Wayra laughed. “You’re quite sane. You’ve just stumbled into a very old story and are now intimately connected to how that story continues or detours or ends.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. About whether you ran with the brujos.”

  “Once, many years ago.”

  “How many years ago?”

  “Hundreds. I’m the last of my kind.”

  Ian heard the loneliness and resignation that echoed in his voice, and decided he didn’t really need to go there. “Were you born a man?”

  Wayra looked amused. “How’s your history, Ian? I was born the same year that Thomas à Becket was appointed archbishop of Canterbury.”

  Becket? Ian nearly choked on that one. “Late eleven hundreds.”

  “Eleven sixty-two. When I was eighteen years old, I was bitten by a shape-shifter in the English countryside, a creature that was part wolf, part dog, part myth. In Spain, in the fourteen hundreds, I was killed because the father of the woman I loved hated me. I arrived in Esperanza when it was still a nonphysical place. But because I was a shape-shifter, different from anything Esperanza knew, I became part of its knowledge and helped to bring about its expansion into the physical world. Because of what I am, I became physical again when Esperanza did.”

  “A kind of Lazarus,” Ian remarked.

  “Lazarus minus the religion. Right now, Esperanza straddles many times and dimensions of consciousness. Even though it’s a physical place, it retains attributes from when it wasn’t. That’s part of its magic—and also its curse. It’s why the brujos are able to wreak so much havoc in Esperanza, but also why the people of Esperanza were able to interact with you and Tess when you weren’t physical. It’s why I continue to flourish. Then there’s the slow-aging factor.”

  Never mind that what he said smacked of mental derangement so severe that even electroshock and massive doses of Thorazine wouldn’t help this guy. Ian believed him. He’d seen the slow-aging evidence in Sara. “And that’s why most people in Esperanza haven’t fled.”

  “Exactly. The choice for them is stark—fight the brujos or risk accelerated aging or death if they flee.”

  “From what I remember, they don’t do much fighting. Mostly, they seem to hide.”

  “They don’t know how to fight the brujos. Everything they’ve done these past seven or eight years is defensive. So the brujos have become bolder. They seize people in other towns, they terrorize communities. There are many in 2008 who believe the appearance of the first transitionals in five centuries is a sign that a nationwide revolt against the brujos is imminent, led by a group whose members lost loved ones to them. They number in the tens of thousands. We need numbers. We need an army. So when the revolt happens, the role of physical helpers will become extremely important.”

  “What’s a physical helper?”

  “Do you remember anything about the light chasers?”

  “Just the phrase. What are they?”

  “Evolved souls. The chasers set events in motion. But they can only do so much. They aren’t gods, Ian, and they aren’t physical. Right now, the only physical helpers the chasers have are me, Ed Granger, Sara We
lls, Juanito Cardenas, and a few others in and around Esperanza. It’s not enough. Every day, somewhere in the world of 2008—and in the latter part of the twentieth century—there are disasters, war, genocide, torture, populations ravaged by disease and bigotry and hunger. Every day, thousands of transitional souls need guidance, insight, direction. The chasers are spread so thinly that they can’t deal effectively with the brujos. They’re outnumbered. And none of their physical helpers can do what you can now, interact with the dying and the dead to offer what chasers typically do. To win this war against the brujos, we need more physical helpers like you, Ian, who can deal with transitionals. You’ve been one, you understand the landscape.”

  “Understand?” Ian laughed, but even to him the laughter sounded scared, desperate. “I haven’t understood a damn thing that’s happened to me since I came to in a hospital room. And, just to set the record straight, my interaction with the dead has been pretty pathetic. An elderly black man who was a cardiac patient, and a family of four in Quito. They asked me questions I didn’t have answers to, Wayra. And in both instances, they disappeared. Moved on. In Quito, some sort of weird light bubble swallowed them.”

  “Weird light bubble.” He smiled at that. “I’ll have to pass on the description. It was a group of chasers. And, just for the record, Ian, that elderly black guy you spoke to at the hospital? He’s now working in Rwanda, 1994, during a genocide in which more than eight hundred thousand people, mainly Tutsi, are killed by extremist Hutu militias, and countless thousands more are maimed and injured. And the family of four you spoke to? They’ll soon be dispatched to December 26, 2004, when a 9.3 earthquake in Indonesia creates a tsunami with fifty-foot waves that will sweep across eleven countries and kill nearly three hundred thousand. The little boy is a gifted empath. In Tess’s time, two accident victims that she helped are now working in Darfur in 2006, where drought, desertification, and overpopulation have resulted in a humanitarian crisis in which half a million have died from disease and hunger, and more than a hundred thousand a year are dying from hunger. But we need physical people in these areas who can immediately help transitionals, who—”

  “Stop,” Ian said. “Please.” He suddenly felt weak, nauseated, just as he had in those final hours in Esperanza. He understood the implications of what Wayra was saying, but couldn’t process anything. “I’m gonna be sick.”

  Wayra swerved to the side of the road, slammed on the brakes. Ian stumbled out and made it as far as the line of trees before his knees buckled and he doubled over and puked. He dug his fingers into the soft earth, breathed in its fecund scent, and sensed the emergence of the larger picture, the plan the chasers had set in motion.

  Behind him, Wayra said, “Your nausea is probably the result of your brief jaunt as a, uh, hybrid.”

  Ian rose up, rocked back on his heels. “Or it could be my body’s reaction to the way you people used Tess and me. You allowed us into Esperanza as transitional souls in the hopes that if we survived the journey back to our physical bodies and returned to Esperanza, it would embolden the masses to revolt against brujo tyranny. You did this to start a war between the living and the dead. And the subplot is that you hoped our near-death experiences would enable Tess and me to interact with . . . transitional souls, and then we would become the first of the new human helpers who would begin to assume some of the chaser chores. Clever, Wayra.” He pushed to his feet. “Did it ever occur to you that your war against these brujos is not our battle? Did you ever think that maybe we wouldn’t want the job? That maybe you shouldn’t have interfered in our lives? I had a life. A profession. Relationships. You and these chasers fucked it up big-time.”

  Wayra didn’t deny any of it. He just said, “You never would have met Tess.”

  It infuriated Ian that Wayra’s voice remained calm, even. “Since we’re separated by forty years, maybe I wasn’t meant to meet her.”

  “We didn’t expect the two of you to fall in love, Ian. That was a bonus. It gave both of you a powerful incentive to survive your physical injuries and to remember what had happened.”

  The gall, Ian thought. “You’re talking about Tess and me like we’re some sort of metaphysical experiment. So forget it, muchacho.”

  Wayra now looked exasperated. “Look, Tess’s father, Charlie, knew there was a strong probability that she would be shot in the line of duty, so he made it possible for her to enter Esperanza, the only place where she might find the will to return to the physical. He also knew she had the qualities we look for in helpers—a strong sense of right and wrong defined by conscience rather than religious beliefs or dogma, a need to serve a cause larger than the self, a great capacity for love and compassion. Charlie wanted a second person with similar attributes, and I suggested you.”

  “How the hell could you know anything about me?”

  Wayra hesitated. Sunlight and shadows ebbed and flowed across his face, changing its contours. He ran his fingers through his hair, started to pace. “I was with a group of chasers who helped your father after he died. Suicides always deserve extra attention. I was curious how his suicide would sculpt the man you would become, so I kept an eye on you through the years. Your need to prove your father wrong about what kind of person you are drove you to write about social and cultural issues. It helped to develop your social conscience and landed you a Pulitzer prize at the age of twenty-eight, for your investigation into the rape and murder of a black woman. It drove you to—”

  “I know my own history. Just because you’ve been alive for centuries doesn’t give you the right to try to psychoanalyze me. You’ve got a lot of goddamn nerve, Wayra, and where the hell does Charlie get off, trying to mold his daughter’s destiny from the afterlife?”

  Wayra’s expression suddenly changed. “Move quickly, muchacho.” He spoke softly. “Fog. In the woods behind you.”

  Ian glanced back. Ribbons of fog snaked along the ground through the trees, wrapped around trunks, brush, and drifted into the lower branches, where it seemed to flutter like a flock of white birds. Already, Ian could hear a soft, insidious sound, like palm fronds dragging against pavement. Then a kind of lewd whispering suffused the air and a bank of the stuff rolled out of the trees, twice as tall as he was, perhaps a quarter of a mile wide, and the chanting exploded through the air. Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body.

  Ian whipped around and tore after Wayra, heart hammering, blood pounding in his ears, memories of the chaos in San Francisco vivid. He threw himself into the passenger seat and Wayra careened onto the road, tires kicking up stones, clouds of dust. The fog rolled on through the dust, gathering speed, growing in size until it filled the side mirror.

  “Jesus, Wayra. We’re not going to be able to outrun it.”

  Wayra eyed the speedometer, barreled into a curve, then tapped the brake, slowing the truck as the road dropped into a steep descent. “Grab your pack, Ian.”

  Ian didn’t like the sound of that. “Why?”

  “Just do it!”

  The tires shrieked, the engine roared, and Wayra swerved sharply to the right. The truck crashed through a flimsy wood railing, splinters flying like spears in every direction, then the tires left the road and they suddenly were airborne. The engine conked out, air whistled past the windows, sunlight exploded through a field way below. For moments, they seemed to ride the currents, suspended between heaven and earth like one of the giant condors Ian had seen in Esperanza. Then the truck’s nose dipped forward, the field below rushed toward them, and Ian knew he was about to die.

  Wayra threw his arms around him, hugging him so hard he couldn’t breathe. His body felt as if it were collapsing, skin and organs turning to mush, bones and cells compressing, eyeballs popping from their sockets. He went blind, deaf, and dumb. Then there was nothing.

  When he could see again, he was flat on his back in a field, a chilly wind blowing over him. He stared into the belly of a twilit sky, heard distant strains of music, smelled smoke and food from a bar
becue. What just happened? Ian pushed himself up. Across the field lay a paved road crowded with traffic—buses, vans, trucks, a line of tidy, colorful concrete buildings. Somewhere nearby, a church bell tolled, its sonorous chords echoing through the moonlight.

  He leaped to his feet, looking around for Wayra, and saw him curled on his side a hundred yards away, his body caught between wolf and man, a kind of chimera. The sight fascinated him in a bizarre kind of way, the compression and extension of bones, snout and head rearranging themselves until the skull and face were human. The fur vanished in a flash, human skin and hair appeared, limbs and paws gave way to two legs, two arms and hands, tail pulled into the body. It happened between one heartbeat and the next. When Wayra peered up at him, the tea-colored eyes were Nomad’s.

  “Explain,” Ian burst out. “Please. Where’s the truck?”

  Wayra sat up with considerable effort, exhaustion apparent in the circles beneath his eyes, the twitch at the corner of his mouth, the soft popping of his joints. “Calm down. You’re making my head hurt.” He rocked slowly onto his knees, brought a cell phone from his back pocket. “Shit. No signal. Let’s go. We need to find a phone, car, weapons.”

  As they strode through the field, Ian said, “Where are we?”

  “The village of Punta in, uh, 2008.”

  “What?” Ian stopped. “You . . . can do that? All this time you could’ve brought me forward? What the hell were you waiting for?”

  Wayra kept moving down the hill toward town. Ian loped after him, caught his arm. “Talk to me.”

  “Okay, okay.” He wrenched his arm free of Ian’s grasp. “I’ve never tried it before. I didn’t know if it was possible to take someone else forward or backward or anywhere in time. It was our only option.” Then he grinned. “But hey, it worked!” Wayra flung his arm around Ian’s shoulders. “And getting here was half the battle.”