Esperanza (30 page)

We have a lead on Tess. And Pearl and Rafael are working on a couple of priests who seem to be on the inside loop of the liberation group.

Progress. A sign the tide was turning.

Suppose we don’t find him, Nica? Or kill him? There’s growing sentiment in the tribe that we need to act defensively now, against the liberation group. They’re our biggest threat. Not the chasers.

She bristled.
As long as I lead this tribe, Ben, we do it my way. We kill the transitionals first.

She felt the intensity of his scrutiny, then he turned away from her, toward the fog, now advancing onto the mainland. Dominica suddenly felt that Ben was no longer her ally. It frightened her. She wanted to rush after
him, to insist they seize bodies, use them up in a wild frenzy of sex and desire. But already, he was too distant from her, and the madness of the
brujo
frenzy was washing over her.

Am I wrong?
Were her priorities misplaced?

Her people seized fishermen, tourists, waiters and waitresses, cops, businessmen, hippies, teachers, students. Up the hills the dark fog rolled, thickening, expanding in width and height until it swallowed cars, cafés, shops, restaurants, and climbed high into the trees. Her tribe was drawn by the promise of bedlam just ahead, where crowds of war protesters shouted and pounded their fists against the air, their voices ringing out through the streets.

With any luck, Ian Ritter would be trampled and killed in this attack.

Ian started downhill on foot, headed for a clothing store where he could buttress his meager wardrobe and buy a new suitcase. Every building he passed boasted ceramic flower pots exploding with colorful flowers—bougainvilleas, pansies, roses, daffodils. Like outside the posada, he thought. Music drifted from open windows. The Presidio stretched before him, a military base that looked like a vast, verdant park stretching all the way to the shores of the bay. Even from here, he could see several hundred war protesters marching and chanting outside the gates, their voices echoing through the clear afternoon air.
Bring ’em home, bring ’em home.

As he neared the bottom of the hill, thousands more protesters spilled down Presidio Avenue, block after block, wave after wave, clear to the bay. Cops in riot gear stood on either side of the road, ready to move in if the swelling group became violent. The sidewalk was still open, pedestrians hurrying along behind the line of cops. Ian hesitated, reluctant to get caught in the crossfire.

He studied the map of Pacific Heights that the hotel employee had given him. The store was just four blocks from here, on California Street. He debated turning back to take Divisadero Street to California, but the protesters might occupy that road, too. So he hurried forward, hands in the pockets of his jacket, measuring the mood of the crowd. At the first sign of hostility, he would dart into one of the shops.

He walked fast, the chants and shouts rising and falling around him, each wave louder, angrier, more hostile. Then the mob surged toward the cops, pelting them with eggs and rocks and screaming,
Death to the pigs!

The cops retaliated, a crushing tsunami of swinging batons that cracked
heads, faces, arms, and drove protestors to the ground. Tear gas thickened in the air. Ian tore up the sidewalk, but hordes of people suddenly scrambled for safety and shoved their way toward the shops, diving for cover under the tables and benches, hurling chairs at the cops. The injured stumbled through the throngs, sobbing for help, blood streaming down their faces. Two women got knocked to the ground and were trampled by the mob behind them. Ian helped one man to his feet and jerked him toward the door of a coffee shop where a woman gestured frantically for people to take refuge inside. They lurched inside the building, the woman slammed the door, and urged them all to the back, where people were streaming out the rear exit, into an alley.

Ian hurried toward the promise of sunlight and escape and stumbled into the alley with several dozen frantic, terrified people. He tore right, racing along with the crowd, and abruptly stopped at the end of the alley. He knew what he was seeing, and his brain kept yelling,
Run, run,
but he couldn’t run. The fog hadn’t just rolled inland. It now climbed the hills, moving toward them with shocking swiftness, thick, dark, at least half a mile wide. Already, he could hear an eerie chant rising from the fog,
Find the body, fuel the body, fill the body, be the body,
and he was suddenly back in Esperanza, the chant crashing over him.

He tore in the opposite direction, pounding the pavement, arms tucked in tightly at his sides. The fog tumbled through the alley behind him, chants rising and falling.
Find the body, fuel the body
. . . Tear gas now mixed with the fog and people ran with their arms covering their mouths and noses. Some of them now twitched, bodies jerking this way and that, as
brujos
seized them. Ian had no idea how this nightmare had found him, but he wasn’t about to be seized. He ran faster, faster, breath exploding from his mouth, and burst out of the alley.

Sirens sundered the air. Police wearing gas masks seemed to be everywhere, leaping out of patrol cars, swinging batons, galloping into the crowd on horses, herding curious spectators to stay back, move aside. He tore up the hill with crowds fleeing the pandemonium on Presidio. His lungs strained, sweat poured down his face.

The fog moved uphill, but at a slower pace, as if the
brujos
were so busy feeding off the bedlam around them they didn’t wanted to stray too far from the mob.
Fill the body, be the body
. . . He didn’t slow, didn’t look back again. At the top of the hill, Ian nearly doubled over from pain, gasped for breath. The hotel doorman trotted down the steps and helped him into the lobby, to a chair.

“Sir, sit tight. I’ll get you something cold to drink.”

Ian couldn’t speak, his chest heaved. The doorman returned with a tall glass of ice-cold water. Ian raised it to his mouth, hands shaking violently. He sipped, eyes darting toward the door, terrified he would see the fog pressing up against it, tendrils clawing at the glass like some rabid dog that wanted in. Instead, people ran past, cop cars raced down Pacific.

“What’s happening down there?” the doorman asked. “We heard the cops moved in on the protestors and it’s a bloodbath. And the fog . . . never seen nothing like it.”

“Thank you for the water. I’d like to settle my bill, get to the airport. I’ll need a cab.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll take care of it.”

He didn’t know how many minutes passed. He finished the water and glanced anxiously toward the door again. Then the doorman brought over the bill and his puny bag. His clothes buying would have to wait until he got to Ecuador. Ian dug out his wallet and gave the doorman cash for the room and a generous tip.

“Your cab’s on the way, sir. There’s some weird stuff going on down there, that’s what we’re hearing now,” the doorman said in a soft, confidential tone. “Like, people acting really strangely, having seizures or something. Fires have been set. Ambulances and fire trucks are on the way. Some of the roads are blocked off.”

“Will I be able to get to the airport?”

“For now, the road to the airport is clear.”

Fifteen minutes later, Ian stood at the hotel door, watching fire trucks and ambulances roar past, sirens shrieking. Crowds continued to pour across the sidewalks, desperate to put distance between themselves and the mayhem at the bottom of the hill. Several times, people tried to enter the hotel, but the doors were locked.

The fog’s advance appeared to have slowed or maybe even stopped somewhere below. When a taxi parked at the curb, Ian swept up his bag, the doorman opened the door, and he hastened out. As the cab pulled away from the curb, the driver, a slightly built Asian man, said, “War protesters are setting buildings on fire down there, people are having convulsions, dozens injured and killed.”

“Can we get to the airport?”

“Don’t worry.” He shook his head. “This is about the war. People know it’s wrong, they want it to end. The war’s to blame.”

The war for souls.
Ian leaned forward, vigilant, alert for any sign of fog. As they reached the top of a hill, fog climbed toward them from a hill to his left, and people were racing away from it, hollering, terrified. The cabbie hit the left blinker. “Go right,” Ian said urgently. “Do whatever you have to do to stay away from the fog.”

“But the airport is to the left and—”

“Go right,” Ian shouted. “Fast.”

The cabbie hung a right, stepped on it, and the cab sped forward, careened onto another street, tore down another hill, screeched into yet another turn, weaving back and forth on one-way streets until they seemed to have broken free of the area the fog covered. Minutes later, signs for the airport appeared.

Would the fog turn toward the airport, socking it in so that flights were delayed or canceled? He didn’t know. But he hoped the
brujos
were like ticks bloated with blood, rendered useless once their appetites were sated.

The cab drew up in front of the airport and Ian handed the cabbie a huge tip. “For your own safety, avoid the fog on your way back.”

Ian scrambled out of the cab with his pack and sprinted into the terminal.

We will first understand how simple the universe is when we recognize how strange it is.

—John Wheeler

The wind chimes that hung in the trees outside her mother’s kitchen were made of pipes and seashells, aluminum, copper, glass. They sang and gonged in the sunrise breeze like high mass rituals in the Sistine Chapel, calling birds to the feeders. Flocks of crows and blue jays, wrens, blackbirds and doves, even wild green parrots fluttered and squawked and jockeyed for spots at the feeders. They brushed the wind chimes, changing the tempo until the yard sounded like an amateur band tuning up. Tess didn’t see a single hummingbird among them and felt immeasurably depressed by their absence.

Ridiculous. Tess couldn’t recall ever seeing a hummingbird in the Florida Keys or anywhere in South Florida.

Her own reflection in the window stared back at her.
I’m still me.
Eyes a smoky blue. Hair long, blond, wavy. A mouth that could yet smile. When she had died five months ago today, her inner landscape had changed dramatically, but she didn’t see it yet in the way she looked. This seemed important.

Pipes clattered somewhere. Her mother or niece were up and she wished she could have an hour more alone. She immediately felt guilty about thinking that way. Her mother had been at the hospital constantly since Tess had been shot back in January. While she’d been in a coma, her mother had moved her to the hospital here in Key Largo where she was director of nursing. The move probably had saved Tess’s life. When she’d awakened from the coma, the faces of her mother and eighteen-year-old niece, Madison, were the first she saw.

In the six weeks since Tess’s release from the hospital, her mother and Maddie had been her most intimate support group. They had cared for her, driven her to physical therapy, cooked and shopped for her, been there when no one else was. Since the house sat on concrete pilings that elevated
it twenty feet off the ground, they had had a wooden ramp built that had enabled her to navigate her wheelchair into and out of the house. Her mom and Maddie even sorted the mounting tally of medical bills, now into seven figures. If Tess’s health insurance covered sixty percent of that, she would still owe enough to make her an indentured servant to the FBI for the next twenty years.

She slid the window open and the June humidity, thick with the scent of ocean and earth, enveloped her. On either side of the window, the edges of the aluminum hurricane shutters were visible. The entire house could be shuttered in about ten minutes, but there were two skylights—one here in the kitchen and another in the living room—without protection. Tess shut the window and turned, staring up at the kitchen skylight, suddenly worried that
something
would get into the house through there.

Absurd. Even though hurricane season had started June 1, the National Hurricane Center had declared that the Atlantic basin was quiet. Besides, the skylights were built to Hurricane Andrew standards, able to withstand category five winds. But could they withstand—
what
? She felt the weight of the word at the tip of her tongue, then it slipped away. This kind of thing had been happening to her often since she’d regained consciousness. She wouldn’t be sharing that detail with the Bureau shrink she was supposed to meet with today, who would determine whether she was mentally healthy enough to return to work.