by JL Bryan
“Gone where?”
“Wherever souls go.” Esmeralda shrugged. “What do you do?”
“I can make people feel fear.”
“I’m not afraid of you.”
“Everyone is. Let me see your hand.”
“Don’t do anything creepy.” She held out her hand to him.
“Everything I do is creepy.” He took her hand and watched the inevitable chill bumps spread up her arms. She trembled and pulled away.
“You see?” he asked.
She touched her fingers to her lips, staring at him.
“I did warn you,” Tommy said.
“No…it’s okay,” she said. “It’s like a shock. I remember from when I was a kid. When you…” She blushed. “Let me try again.”
She took his hand in both of hers. She shuddered, but she kept looking him in the eye. Tommy felt his own heart move faster at her touch. She was going to drive him crazy.
“How scared are you?” Tommy asked.
“It’s kind of a rush,” she said. “It makes you feel alive.” She stepped closer and looked up at him. “I want to scream. But I like it. I want you to touch me more.”
She reached up and laid a cold, sweaty palm against his neck.
“I need you to do something for me,” he said.
She pushed closer against him. “What do you want?”
“I have the body of a third person. Like us. I need you to read it, or whatever you do.”
She took a breath and stepped back, releasing his hand. “Is that why you came?”
“I’m trying to understand more about what we are. Don’t you want to understand?”
“It can’t be understood,” Esmeralda said. “We are as God created us.”
“I’m not sure God did,” Tommy said. “We aren’t like normal people.”
“So who is this person?”
“A girl,” Tommy said.
“Oh. And what do you want to learn from her?”
“I saw her on television,” he said. “She seemed very together, very in control. And I can’t stop thinking about her.”
Esmeralda looked over the cliff and said nothing.
“I think she’s like us,” Tommy said. “Whatever we are. Only she knew what she was doing.”
“And you could see all this on the television?” Esmeralda asked, still not looking at him.
“I just felt it. I keep dreaming about her. I keep seeing her face and hearing her voice, all the time.”
“So you did not come out here for me,” Esmeralda said. “You came for her.”
“It’s all the same thing,” Tommy said. “It’s all about figuring out what we are, and what we can do—”
“It is not the same thing! You either came here for me, or for her.”
Tommy looked at her, not sure what to say. He hadn’t really thought very deeply about any of this.
Esmeralda sighed. “Take me to the body. I’ll do it. But then take me home.”
“If that’s what you want.” Tommy opened the saddlebag on the side of the bag, and he brought out the backpack with flowers and hearts sewn into it.
“What’s that?” Esmeralda asked.
“The body.” He unzipped the backpack and brought out the muddy wad of the dress. He unrolled it across the rocky sand, revealing a third of Ashleigh’s skull and a pile of bone fragments, with black crust flaking off them.
“Gross!” Esmeralda said. “That’s been right there the whole time?”
“This is all that’s left of her.”
“It won’t work,” she said. “It’s too old and broken up. Usually I do it soon after they’re dead.”
“It’s not actually old,” Tommy said. “Just wrecked.”
Esmeralda sighed. “I can try it, but I don’t promise anything.”
“Go ahead.”
She knelt on the sand next to the desiccated bones. She took a breath, then picked up the broken hunk of Ashleigh’s skull.
She closed her eyes.
Tommy watched her, feeling very nervous. If this didn’t work, he didn’t know what else he could do.
Esmeralda began to hum—not a song, but a drawn-out, tuneless noise.
Her eyes flew open, and she was staring right at Tommy.
“Finally!” she shouted. “Why did you wait so long?”
“What?” Tommy asked.
“I’ve been screaming at you day and night. ‘Get out of that prison and come get me!’ It took you forever!”
“What are you talking about?”
“God damn it, I hate being between incarnations,” she said. “Nobody sees you, nobody hears you, your powers are worthless…I missed the flesh.” She looked down at herself. She squeezed her own breast with her hand. “This isn’t a bad body, either! Not as pretty as my last one, but I’ll take it. Too bad she’s Mexican, though. And no money. Yuck.”
Tommy just stared at her until she looked back. Her eyes seemed a little different—as if their deep, rich brown color had turned a very dark shade of gray.
“Oh, guess you want a reward,” she said. With the hand that wasn’t holding Ashleigh’s skull, Esmeralda began unbuttoning her white blouse. She wore a flimsy, lacy bra underneath, and he could see the dark circles of her nipples. “Do you want to screw her body?”
“What?”
“Come on.” She stepped close to Tommy. Everything was different—her posture was taller and straighter, and she had a commanding tone to her voice. She hooked her fingers into Tommy’s belt. “It’s been a long time. I wanted to keep up the whole unattainable virgin thing in my last life, and there wasn’t a boy in Fallen Oak who wouldn’t have bragged about fucking me. So I went that whole lifetime without doing it.”
“Are you…Ashleigh Goodling?” Tommy asked.
“How are you this dumb again? You get dumber every time you’re born. It takes forever to train you.”
“I still have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She sighed. “Okay. I am Ashleigh Goodling, or that was my name in my most recent life. But I didn’t remember my past lives then. I didn’t remember what I really was. And if I wanted to come back, I had to go through the whole process of being born and being a baby and forgetting everything again. And I can’t let Jenny and Seth win like that.”
“Okay,” Tommy said. “Past lives?”
Ashleigh rolled her eyes. “Do we have to do this now?”
“What do you want to do?”
“I want to get your pants off.” Ashleigh tugged at his belt buckle but couldn’t pry it open with one hand. She used two fingers of her other hand, the one holding the broken piece of skull. The skull slipped out and fell to the ground.
“Fuck that!” she screamed. She let go of his belt and scrambled back from Tommy. “What are you doing?” She looked down, saw her shirt hanging open, and hurried to cover herself. “What are you doing to me?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Tommy said. “You started taking off your clothes.”
“It wasn’t me. It was her.” Esmeralda shuddered. “That’s not how it’s supposed to work. The soul is supposed to be gone. It’s like she was still there, just waiting to…” She scowled at Tommy. “You planned this, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t know that would happen.”
“But she knew,” Esmeralda said. “She was waiting. She jumped right into me. I didn’t even know that could happen.”
“Is it because she’s like us?”
“How would I know?”
“She talked about past lives. Like reincarnation,” Tommy said.
“I don’t believe in that.” Esmeralda’s dark amber eyes smoldered with anger. “I did what you wanted. Now take me home.”
“You have to let me talk to her again.”
“No.” Esmeralda’s voice grew quiet. “She scares me.”
“I thought you liked being scared.”
She glared at him. “I’m not letting her take control of me again.”
“I have to
talk with her.” Tommy reached for Esmeralda’s arm.
She walked backwards towards the road, keeping her distance from him, watching his reaching hand warily.
“Esmeralda, wait—” Tommy said.
“I said no!” Esmeralda turned to run, tripped over a stone, and sprawled in the road.
“Let me help you.” Tommy shed his other glove and reached for her with both hands.
“No! Don’t touch me! Don’t…”
He seized her arms and pushed fear into her, the way he had with the prison guards. She shook hard in his grasp.
“You will do as I say,” Tommy told her. “Pick up the skull.”
“No,” she whispered, though she was shaking in fright. “Find someone else.”
“There is no one else.”
Mentally, he pushed harder, and she cried out.
“Then find someone else…who will be possessed by her,” Esmeralda whispered. “I’ll put her in someone else. But I would rather die than let her inside me again.”
Tommy was impressed by her ability to resist him. Maybe it was because she had a power of her own, he thought. Or maybe she was just incredibly stubborn.
“Okay,” Tommy said. “But then you have to come with me.”
“Yes,” she whispered, close to tears now. “Whatever you want.”
“That’s right,” Tommy said. “Whatever I want.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
When Alexander stepped up into the rear of the box truck, the two men with machine guns stopped talking with each other and watched him warily, their hands tight on their weapons.
In this part of Mexico, people knew Alexander as El Brujo, the sorcerer. His hair and eyes were dark, his skin a deep bronze from life in the sun. He wore a black Egyptian cotton t-shirt and dark, mirrored sunglasses. From a distance, it would be hard to guess that he was a gringo from Brentwood, a recent Stanford drop-out pursuing an interesting opportunity south of the border.
Inside the truck, three dead bodies lay in a puddle on the floor, flies already crawling on them as they rotted in the heat. The fourth bandito, the one that was still alive, knelt with his hands roped behind him. One eye was swollen shut, and he bled from both nostrils, but he kept his spine upright like a well-trained soldier.
The survivor was tough and wouldn’t speak, and this was why Papa Calderòn had sent in El Brujo.
“Hello, Carlos.” Alexander spoke to him in Spanish. Alexander had known both English and Spanish from the moment he was born, along with hundreds of other languages, most of them dead. “My friends tell me you aren’t cooperating. They say you refuse to speak. This is very rude of you, Carlos.”
Carlos glared defiantly at Alexander and said nothing.
“Who sent you, Carlos?” Alexander asked. “If you don’t tell us, we will unleash the greatest horror you have ever seen. The remainder of your life will be a long waking nightmare, if you do not speak now.”
Carlos did not speak.
“I don’t want to be here, Carlos,” Alexander said. “I should be on a plane right now. I have important business in the north. Don’t slow me down, Carlos. I don’t have time to play.”
Carlos didn’t answer.
“You killed our driver,” Alexander said. “And his bodyguard. You stole our shipment. Now the situation is simple, no? You tell us where to find our missing product—you tell us who has it now—and you live. If not…” He gestured to the three bullet-riddled bodies on the floor. “Who sent you? Was it Toscano?”
“Nobody sent us,” Carlos said. “We are independent.”
“Independent?” Alexander laughed. “You want to say you moved against Papa Calderòn, in this state, with the blessing of no one? I am to believe you are that stupid?”
Carlos just stared at him.
“We do not believe you are that stupid.” Alexander knelt in the pool of three dead men’s blood, paying no mind to the damage done to his Armani jeans. He grabbed the hair of a dead man lying face down in the congealed blood.
“Leave him alone,” Carlos said.
Alexander lifted the dead man’s face from the blood. The man had a bristly moustache and thick jowls. His mouth hung open. “This guy, your friend,” Alexander said. “I believe he is that stupid. He has a stupid face.” Alexander slammed the dead man’s face into the floor of the truck, and Carlos jumped.
“Or this guy.” Alexander touched the second corpse, and then the third. “Or him. They all look like stupid little men.”
Carlos snarled, just a little. Alexander was getting to him.
Alexander smiled as he stood. He gave one of the bodies a hard kick for good measure. “Your friends, stupid. But you do not look stupid.” Alexander approached Carlos. “You look disciplined. Smart. Maybe ex-military, no? Or a former federale?”
Carlos gave a hard stare, his eyes full of anger.
“Anyway,” Alexander said, “You are a man who follows orders. We only want to know whose.” He paused to give Carlos an opportunity to speak, which Carlos didn’t take.
Alexander walked in a slow circle around Carlos.
“We know that Toscano and his friends do not like what Papa Calderòn is doing,” Alexander said. “But Papa Calderòn has ended his past relationship with Toscano. That won’t change. We are…what did you call yourself? We are independent of Toscano’s organization now. And if Toscano doesn’t want to do business on our terms, this is fine. But he must leave our men and our shipments alone. Do you understand?”
Alexander knelt beside Carlos and spoke directly into the man’s bloody, bullet-nipped ear.
“I will tell you a secret thing,” Alexander said in a lower voice. “We do not need your confession. Papa Calderòn knows who sent you. He simply wants you to deliver a message back to your boss. Can you do this?”
Carlos looked back at him, but didn’t answer.
Alexander held out a hand toward the three dead men.
They began to rock side to side in their own blood.
Carlos watched them with wide eyes.
“You know what name they call me, don’t you?”
“El Brujo,” Carlos whispered. “Papa Calderòn’s witch.”
“They call me this for a reason.” Alexander lifted his hand a few inches, and the dead men rose to their knees. “It is because I am a high priest of the devil. A necromancer, and a wielder of black magic.” Alexander lifted his hand higher, and the three dead men stood, swaying like palms in the wind, unsteady on their feet. Alexander backed away from Carlos.
The three corpses shuffled around, bumping into each other as if drunk, until they all managed to turn and face Carlos.
Alexander crooked his fingers, and the bullet-riddled corpses advanced on Carlos, one sluggish dragging step at a time, heads lolling and limp, eyes blank, mouths open and drooling.
Carlos began to whisper a prayer to the Virgin Mary, and the two machine-gun men, Papa Calderòn’s foot soldiers, crossed themselves.
“And so, Carlos, here is the message,” Alexander said. “If the raids against Papa Calderòn do not stop, I will unleash horrors on Toscano and all his friends. I will send an army of demons to their homes to eat their families.”
The reanimated corpses closed in around Carlos, grabbing and clawing him, biting at his face. Carlos screamed.
“Tell your boss that God has been banished from this land, and the Devil walks among us,” Alexander said.
Carlos cried out as the corpses of his friends bit and tore at his flesh.
“You tell him I am here, and I will come for him.” Alexander snapped his fingers. The three corpses fell to the ground like rag dolls.
Carlos remained on the blood-spattered truck floor, curled in a fetal position, weeping softly, bleeding from bite marks all over his body.
“Release him,” Alexander said to the men with machine guns. “Let him go back to his boss, and don’t cut his tongue out. We want him free to talk.”
Alexander stepped down from the truck. Outside, a
scorching wind blew through the arid Mexican countryside. The box truck was parked inside a weathered old barn that was missing much of its roof.
Alexander walked to his own car, a black Mercedes convertible, parked in the huge empty doorway of the barn.
He was running late. There was a girl up north he needed to find, if he was going to do what Papa Calderòn wanted him to do. Alexander had been waiting his entire life to meet her.
The rural highway took him through vast open pastures with sparse grass and skinny cattle. The hot, dry pastoral landscape was broken only by an occasional farmhouse or old church, with a graveyard full of huge pastel sculptures.
His name in this lifetime was Alexander, but he’d had a thousand names, and if he had to, he could list them all. He was twenty years old, but his memories spanned all the way back into the deep primeval world, long before the dawn of civilization.
In all of those lifetimes, ever since his kind had first found their way here and learned to incarnate among the humankind, his touch had possessed the power to command the dead.
By himself, he couldn’t make the reanimated dead do much—just a few repetitive tasks, or continuous marching. The dead were stupid. But if he charged up his power, he could make them wield swords, and maybe guns.
From his past lives, he knew how best to amplify his power. He hadn’t met her in this lifetime, not yet, but he was on his way to reconnect with her. And he planned to bring her back with him, whether she liked that idea or not.
He drove north.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Darcy Metcalf lived in a ranch-style house with windowboxes full of dandelions and other weeds. Tommy parked his motorcycle in her driveway, behind a pick-up truck with Chuck O’ Flannery bumper stickers, featuring the sweaty talk show host with dialogue balloons: “No Healthcare for Hippies!” and “Save A Bullet, Stab a Leftie!”
Tommy smiled, taking it as a good omen. The O’Flannery Overview Hour was where he’d first seen Ashleigh.
He and Esmeralda stepped off the bike. A beady-eyed woman peered out a window, probably drawn by the sound of his motorcycle.
Tommy led the way up the steps to Darcy’s front door. Esmeralda trailed behind him. He felt bad about having to keep Esmeralda in fear, but he needed her.
