Esperanza (51 page)

Granger picked up his last shot, turned it slowly in his hand, sipped at it
rather than downing it like a man dying of thirst. “I knew this wouldn’t work. But when Charlie cleared the way for you to come through, I figured we had to do our part. The first transitionals in five centuries and one of them is Charlie’s kid. That symbolism was just too great to ignore.”

“Why?” Tess asked.

“Because we recruited him when he was still alive, when he took up meditation during the final two years of his life. Major stress levels for him then. The meditation helped. He entered fully into the chaser world when he died. He understood what was at stake.”

“But he tried to manipulate
my
destiny from the afterworld. That’s screwed up, Ed. The whole thing is. Unless you people fix things internally and muster the courage to fight the
brujos,
you’re all lost. If I’m going to reach Esperanza, I’ll do it under my own steam, on my own terms. I don’t intend to be a pawn in anyone else’s drama.”

She went over to the bar, settled the bill for dinner and drinks, and asked the bartender how to get to the bus station. When she turned to leave, Granger was slumped over at the table, head resting in his arms.

It had grown considerably colder. The stars looked crisp, bright, close enough to touch, the Milky Way stretched from one end of the sky to the other, Led Zeppelin’s
Stairway to Heaven.
Maddie and Lauren waited by the SUV. “Good work, ladies. You creamed him.”

“Idiots are easy targets,” Maddie said.

Tess told them about the blog, the gathering in Dorado, the buses. “It sounds like just the sort of grassroots uprising you were talking about in there, Maddie.”

“Awesome, this is awesome,” Maddie breathed. “We can take turns driving.”

“I like the idea of safety in numbers,” Lauren said. “Let’s check it out.”

The route to the bus station took them through the center of Tulcán. The streets bustled with pedestrians, restaurants and bars were crowded with tourists: Americans, Europeans, South Americans, Asians, blacks, whites, everything in between. Ecuador, someone had once said to her, was the heart of the universe. It certainly had become the heart and soul of
her
universe.

As they approached Tulcán’s topiary cemetery, famous for its aboveground tombs and garden sculpted from cypress bushes, Maddie asked if they could stop briefly to take photos. “The guy responsible for starting it
in 1936 is buried there and called the cemetery so beautiful that it ‘invites one to die.’ We should at least have a picture.”

“In the dark?” Lauren asked.

“Photoshop performs miracles.”

Tess felt uneasy here. The pedestrians, restaurants, and cafés were behind them, she had no desire to see a cemetery so beautiful that it invited you to die, and she wanted to get over to the bus station. “I’ll park in front of the entrance, leave the headlights on, and you can snap pictures from inside the car. How’s that?”

It wasn’t what Maddie had in mind, but she didn’t argue. Tess turned into the cemetery, dimly lit by street lamps that cast an eerie pall over the dizzying array of giant green geometric shapes and arches, the perfectly sculpted angels and animals, and the bleached white tombs that resembled the ruins of an ancient civilization.

She stopped in front of a huge hedge shaped and clipped into an archway so perfect that it seemed to invite you within, just as the creator of the gardens had said. Maddie opened the rear door and stepped out to take her pictures. Tess’s arm began to itch, then burn.
Shit.
“Get in, Maddie.”

“I’m not done yet. There—”

“Get in,”
Tess yelled.

As she did, ribbons of fog swirled through the giant green arch, hugging the ground, wisps of the stuff drifting upward into bushes, strands wrapping around the green like a string of pale Christmas lights. Tess threw the SUV into reverse and peeled away from the arch with her heart pounding in her throat. Her eyes flicked from the rearview mirror to the side mirror.

“It’s still coming, Tesso!” Maddie shouted.

It also was expanding like some mammoth carnival balloon, perhaps bolstered somehow by the dead in the cemetery’s tombs. Tess looped back toward town, hoping she could lose the fog in the maze of narrow streets.

As the ball of fog rolled after the Expedition, it kept growing larger, thicker, denser. Tess knew that if it followed them into neighborhoods, residents might be seized. But if she didn’t turn somewhere, Lauren and Maddie would be at risk. She estimated that the fog was half a mile behind them, giving them a slight edge. She turned into a neighborhood of small family-owned businesses, most of them closed for the night, and stopped at the curb.

“What’re you doing?” her mother asked, alarmed.

“I’m not running anymore. They can’t seize me, so I’m going to confront
these bastards. We seem to have cell service here in town, so keep your cells on. Go back downtown, stay in crowds. I’ll call you when it’s gone.”

“But . . .” Lauren stammered.

“Tesso, this is nuts,” said Maddie. “You can’t . . .”

She got out, bag over her shoulder, cell zipped into the pocket of her jacket. She loped toward the end of the block and heard the Expedition’s engine coughing, revving, then it peeled off in the opposite direction. When she reached the intersection, she could see it, the fog now a densely compact globe five feet high, wider at the circumference, still in motion. It looked luminous, as if all the
brujos
within it radiated a kind of energy that kept the fog lit, moving with purpose. Tess stepped off the curb, walked out into the middle of the road, mouth dry with fear, the mark on her wrist burning. Curiosity drove her forward.
What are you?

The globe stopped, ribbons of fog stirring in the night air, light from the old street lamps spilling over it. Two cars sped toward it on the other side, approaching from the border with Colombia, and both screeched to a halt about a hundred yards from the fog. Doors flew open, the drivers and passengers piled out, young travelers, maybe college students, with their digital cameras, camcorders. They probably thought the huge globe in the middle of the road was a UFO. In an hour, the spectacle would be on YouTube.

Tess was afraid they would attract the
brujos’
attention, so she trotted toward the globe, shouting,
“Here I am, you bastards
. . .
Estoy aquí, pendejos . . . ”

The fog moved rapidly now, streamers shooting outward, information-gathering surrogates that eddied toward her, across the pavement. She barely suppressed an overpowering desire to run. She kept shouting, taunting the
brujos.
“That’s right, c’mon, you bastards, I’m not running anymore.”

The first streamers curled around her ankles, sending a chill into the soles of her feet, through her socks, into her calves. More streamers twisted around her legs, thighs, down her arms, between her fingers, an insidious touch, creepy in the extreme. A dry, rustling sound filled her head, the whispered voices of the dead. Then the entire globe of fog rolled over her, swallowing her.

The dry whispers grew to a loud, irritating chatter. It was as if she were in the middle of a cocktail party with hundreds of guests, everyone talking over everyone else so that no single voice could be heard. A bone-deep cold cut through her, turning her eyes as dry as paper. Her wrist felt scorched. An
almost unbearable pressure pushed against the base of her skull, as if they were exploring her in some way, as if she were an alien country to them.

A chant exploded in her head.
Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body,
louder and louder, until the chant hammered at every part of her. Terror and pain buckled her knees, she went down, hands gripping the sides of her head, then doubled over, arms covering her head. Suddenly she reared up, yelling, “Who speaks for you?”

Find the body, fuel the body.

“No one?” Her voice rang with false bravado. “Where’s your leader? Where’s Dominica?”

The chants abruptly stopped. In the subsequent silence, she heard the frantic thundering of her own heart.

“Who speaks for you?” she shouted again.

“We are one voice.”

She sensed the
brujo
spokesperson was female. “Then hear this. Your battle is not with me. I only want to return to Esperanza and find Ian. We just want to be left alone.”

“Your presence will destroy us.”

“Wrong. Your battle isn’t with me and this battle isn’t mine.”

The chanting started again, then the cold bit into the back of her neck and the pressure against her skull grew so intense that it drove her, shrieking, onto her side. The base of her skull felt as if it were being pried open with a dull blade and Tess gasped and curled into a fetal position. Blackness spread like India ink across her peripheral vision. Seconds, she was only seconds away from losing consciousness. They couldn’t seize her, but they could cause her such agony that madness or death looked appealing.

She rolled, struggling to escape the globe, but it simply drifted outward, always remaining just beyond her, trapping her inside of it. The prying sensation reached the top of her skull and she reared up, hands clawing at the sides of her head, lungs screaming for air, her stomach in revolt from the pain. She suddenly heard her father.

Laugh, Slim, laugh until your sides ache, laugh until tears roll down your face.

Laugh? She rolled onto her knees and flung herself back, then forward again, and air flowed into her lungs. She sucked it in and exploded with laughter. She laughed until her sides ached and tears streamed down her face. The pain ebbed, drew back, and she forced herself to keep laughing as she got
shakily to her feet. The globe didn’t withdraw, but the chanting stopped, she was completely without pain now.

Her dad stood at the edge of the fog, fist pounding the air. He said something, but she couldn’t understand him. Charlie, ever innovative, held up a blackboard.
Station liberation follow.

Then Charlie faded away, and she said, “Tell Dominica that she can’t stop me from entering Esperanza. Tell her I know the way in.”

The luminous globe rapidly withdrew and a young man, camcorder hanging from his neck, stumbled forward, moving as if his own body were foreign to him. “Tell me yourself.” His companions tore away from him, back to their car. They understood something terrible and terrifying was happening to him. The kid’s cheeks were ruddy from the cold, his handsome, youthful face skewed with pain. In his eyes, Tess recognized Dominica.

“You can’t stop me.”

The kid’s head jerked back and he laughed, but it sounded unnatural, like loud hiccups. Dominica was having trouble with the kid’s body. “If you continue your journey, I will do to Dan what I’m going to do to this young man.”

“Why?”

“Because I can.”

“But what’s the point?”

“Esperanza belongs to my kind. It was stolen from us. We intend to take it back.”

“Fine, take it. But you don’t have to kill to do it.”

“You’re an outsider. If you really understood what Esperanza is, you would not be so cavalier about our taking it.”

“Like I said, this isn’t my battle. Or Ian’s. But if you make it our battle, then we’ll defeat you precisely because we
are
outsiders.”

A siren sounded—not cops, but like an air-raid siren—and metal grates in the road suddenly clattered open and cyclones of air exploded upward, dispersing the globe of fog that hovered to the kid’s left.

Tess slapped him across the face, yelled,
“Fight her, fight, fight!”

The kid wrenched back, tripped, slammed to the ground. Tess kept hollering and dancing around him like a referee at a wrestling match. The powerful bursts of air continued to explode through the grates, carrying her voice across the darkness.

Then he went still, sprawled on his stomach. A dark mist drifted from the top of his head and the wind took it away.
Please don’t be dead
. Tess
knelt beside him, turned him over. No bleeding. “Hey.” She touched his neck. Heartbeat strong, steady. “Hey, wake up.”

He opened his eyes, groaning as he pushed up, looking wildly around, rattling off something in German.
“No hablo alemán,”
she said.

He switched with ease to English. “Is it gone?”

“Yes. I’m not sure where your friends went. Do you have a cell phone? A way to get in touch with them?”

He patted the pockets of his jeans, brought out his cell. The face was smashed.

“Use mine,” she said. “Call them and get out. You fought well.”

He took her cell, and as they quickly crossed to the other side of the street, the explosions of air from the open metal grates chilled her. “My friends are close by,” the kid said. “I heard you . . . shouting at me to fight. It . . . what
was
that thing? I remember seeing something in the road . . . and you . . . you were inside it and then . . . I felt violated, it pushed me down . . . inside a metal room without windows, doors, or light . . . and took over my body . . .” His eyes brimmed with tears, he looked away, embarrassed.

Tess squeezed his shoulder. “If you see fog again, run fast in the opposite direction.” She punched out her mother’s cell number.