Esperanza

by Trish J. MacGregor

  The man and woman emerged from the main building, flanked by Nomad and a black and white cat, with an Amazonian parrot flying low overhead. Now that Dominica saw the woman awake, moving, she got a good look at her—a knockout, nearly six feet tall, slender, curves in the right places. She moved with the grace of a dancer, her long blond hair shining in the early light. The man, bearded and so stunningly handsome, intrigued her. Such a perfect profile, a seductive mouth, long, certain strides.

  She still couldn’t quite bring herself to believe what had happened. The first transitionals in Esperanza in five hundred years. Even though she hoped it meant that more transitionals were on the way, she couldn’t move beyond her suspicion that it was a light-chaser strategy, perhaps concocted to divert the brujos from further attacks on the city. Dangle the carrot, distract them, make them believe the city is open to transitionals again. But surely the chasers didn’t believe the brujos were that stupid.

  Right now, she was the only one of her kind who knew about the transitionals. It was up to her to find out as much as she could about who they were, how they’d gotten here, if they were really protected. Back there on the bus she had been at a disadvantage, unable to assume a virtual form because of the risk it would pose to her from the driver and Nomad. But the dog had sensed her anyway and when she had assumed a form outside the bus, Manuel mocked her and turned the flamethrower on her.

  But once Juanito fixed them herbal tea to induce a deep, heavy sleep, she would be able to study the man and woman more closely. The herb grew in the greenhouses outside of Esperanza and while it probably did help to counteract the effects of altitude, it was primarily a sleep aid. And with these two, it was a protective measure. Keep the targets sedated until a strategy can be implemented to keep them safe. And ignorant of the fact that they were in comas, nearly dead.

  She imagined Juanito in the cottage, putting away groceries and supplies, chatting amiably with the couple as he fixed the sleeping tea. Nomad and the cat would curl up by the fire and the parrot would find a perch, completing the silly picture of domestic bliss. Goddamn dog, cat, bird. Goddamn Juanito. Goddamn all of them.

  She waited within a light fog at the edge of the posada courtyard, wishing she could think herself into an insect form, a mosquito, a fly, something small with wings so she could get into the cottage to watch and listen. But even the magic of Esperanza couldn’t make such a thing possible.

  The sun rose higher, spilling light across the inn’s courtyard. The fog burned off. She finally saw Juanito slip out of cottage 13 like a guilty thief, Nomad trotting alongside him, the parrot riding on his back, the cat trailing behind them. Why hadn’t Juanito left Nomad behind to guard them?

  Halfway up the path, the dog paused again and glanced out toward the back property and the trees. He senses me. Just as he had sensed her on the bus. But he apparently couldn’t see her because when Juanito called to him, Nomad trotted on and he and Juanito vanished into the main building. There, Juanito would report to Ed Granger that the transitionals were sedated. Granger would get in touch with Sara Wells, a cultural anthropologist, another interloper, and with Illika Huicho, the leader of the Quechua, they would come up with a plan. Let them plan.

  She finally left her hiding place and paused at the door of cottage 13, listening for sounds within. Electricity hummed through the wires, but she heard nothing else and slipped inside. Logs crackled in the fireplace, the air smelled of smoke, sugar, something mildly bitter. She moved on into the bedroom, paused between the beds, listened to their breathing. Definitely drugged.

  Dominica moved toward the man first. He slept in the bed under the window, one hand tucked under his jaw, legs drawn up toward his chest so that his body formed a sort of lightning bolt, as it had on the bus. Now that she was alone with them and they were sedated, she felt safe enough to create a tenuous form, a simple farm woman. She leaned in close to the man and inhaled the air that he breathed, trying to trace it back through time.

  She found his name, embedded in his smells. Ian. She caught a whiff of soap, the most superficial odor. He’d showered before he’d fallen into bed. She inhaled more deeply and uncovered the scents that told of his journey to Esperanza—a hospital, medicines, the smells of a particular type of sickness. Heart? This felt right. He’d had a massive heart attack. Then she smelled dust, earth, rocks, odors that had come after he slipped into a coma and his soul left his body and crossed the Río Palo. At this point, his soul apparently assumed its human form, which would explain the sharp tang of food, probably from the bodega, and a strong smell of hormones. She examined that last scent more closely and knew it was associated with his deep attraction to the woman.

  She ran her hand over his hair. Like silk. What an opportunity he presented, this transitional. She could seize his soul and it would take her to his comatose body. If she could heal his body, she could live out his mortal life. Even though she preferred women, she believed in making do with what was available. But perhaps Ben could take Ian and she could take the woman and . . . You’re getting ahead of yourself.

  Dominica sat at the edge of the woman’s mattress. A bed hog. She sprawled on her back, arms flung out at her sides, mouth slightly open. She noticed the bruise on the underside of her wrist. The longer Dominica looked at it, the stranger it seemed. She thought it emitted a sound, a high-pitched hum, but maybe she was imagining it. Dominica leaned toward her, inhaling deeply. Name first. Tess. Ian and Tess. Nice ring to it, like Adam and Eve. She inhaled Tess’s breath, moving past the scent of toothpaste to the deeper odors.

  Violence, gunfire, blood. Dominica jerked back, alarmed. Tess looked like a model, not a warrior. But the odors didn’t lie. She leaned in closer again, struggling to trace the smells of violence back to their source. There. Go deeper. Hold it. A warehouse. Police? No, federal agents. Dozens of them. Something went terribly wrong, Tess was in the crossfire, took a bullet to her thigh, nearly bled to death, flatlined during surgery, was revived but slipped into a coma and her soul took flight.

  Dominica sensed a lot of people around Tess, caring for her, talking to her constantly to draw her out of the coma. But what connected her and the man?

  She brought her mouth close to Tess’s, pulling her breath deeply into herself. She moved back to Ian and did the same thing. Molecules braided together, each strand a story. She couldn’t follow every plot line, but the bottom line was obvious: Esperanza was their destiny. Before they were born as Tess and Ian, their souls had agreed to this experience. They shared a lack of belief in an afterlife and yet both carried a kind of blueprint of the other, an ineffable, powerful need to find their other half. A love that spanned many lifetimes had brought them here.

  It scared her. She understood this kind of need, the power of an insatiable hunger for another. They weren’t like her, they would not settle for loving the one you were with.

  Dominica thrust her farm woman’s hand into Tess’s chest and smiled when her body twisted away from the pain. She feels it, the intrusion. Dominica quickly shed her form and allowed her essence to settle over Tess’s body, to sink into it through her hair, scalp, chest. She was immediately hurled out. Enraged, she threw herself onto Tess, so that they would merge, and was instantly catapulted upward.

  Impossible. In six hundred years, she had never been unable to seize a human. There were bodies she found distasteful or repulsive, too ill or filled with toxins to be used for more than a few minutes. Frequently, seized humans fought back and occasionally the struggle was so brutal that Dominica simply vacated the body. But that she was unable to seize a human, especially a transitional soul, was almost beyond her comprehension. Who or what protected Tess? Was it that mark on her wrist? Did it protect her somehow?

  She looked at Ian. What about you? Are you protected, too? Dominica dived at him—and was flung so violently upward that she passed through the ceiling and sailed out into the blue morning sky.

  Her emotions lurched from confusion to indignation to rage. She
thought herself into the main building, past the front desk where Granger busied himself with paperwork. She briefly toyed with the idea of seizing him, this Aussie bastard who worked so hard to defeat the brujos. But he disgusted her. She went into his office, assumed the form of a cleaning woman, an inn employee. The shape was too weak to last more than a few minutes, but it was all she needed.

  His computer was on. She moved the mouse, the screensaver vanished, and an Internet site filled the screen, something called liberationblogspot.com. As she clicked through it, horror seeped into her, a toxic gas. A rumor no more.

  The blog appeared to have been started five years ago by Vivian Ortiz from Guayaquil whose parents had bled out simultaneously on a beach. Their deaths initiated Vivian’s search for answers and that search had intensified when the autopsy results determined that no virus or bacteria was to blame. Cerebral hemorrhages had taken them both. She had reached out to others who might have lost friends and family in the same way and, over time, stories had poured in from all over South America.

  Vivian studied the stories like a forensics expert and eventually put together a kind of MO—identifiable symptoms that victims exhibited before their deaths, the types of people most likely to suffer bleed-outs, why they might be occurring. When her search led her to the mythology of Esperanza—and to the brujos, a word she didn’t use, but a phenomenon she described as parasitic—the tone of the blog had taken a radical change. We will take back our freedom when they least expect it and extract our revenge. We will vindicate the deaths of our loved ones and take back Esperanza before this parasite infiltrates the entire continent.

  Dominica heard noises just outside the door. Hurry. She clicked on the map of South America and it suddenly filled with thousands of red dots. At the bottom of the screen, a number and description appeared: 22,162 cerebral hemorrhages reported since 2003. The figure shocked her, filled her with fear. If those victims had at least one person who had joined the liberation movement as a result of the deaths, it meant more than twenty thousand avengers who hoped to obliterate brujos.

  Dominica made note of the URL, then went into Granger’s e-mail, brought up his sent mail file. The most recent e-mail intrigued her.

  Effective immediately, all wireless devices, including laptops, cell phones, iPods etc must be kept in the storage area during work hours. & no Internet. The new arrivals, the American couple, must be treated cordially, but nothing can be revealed to them. Alert me if either of them is sighted. Their passport photos are attached.

  Why the caution about wireless devices, the Internet, cell phones? Granger had sent the e-mail to every Internet café, restaurant, shop, and church in the city, to all employees at the inn, to everyone who was anyone in the Esperanza hierarchy. He was scared. And because he was scared he had contacted Sara Wells and told her the impossible had happened. Two transitionals have arrived.

  The next e-mail, sent around the time Dominica was inside the bus, mystified her, too. It had been addressed to “undisclosed recipients,” and read: Alert Charlie. They’ve been identified.

  Was “Charlie” some sort of code or a person, perhaps connected to the liberation blog?

  Voices on the other side of the door. Dominica pressed another key, shed her form, fled the posada grounds.

  She headed for the Lago del Sueño, a hot spring at the foot of a hundred-foot cliff behind the posada. She created a new form, one of her favorites, an Amazonian warrior queen, a ballbuster. She didn’t care that it flickered uncontrollably, that she was too weak to provide the solidity she needed to feel the cool earth against her bare feet, make out the color of the sunlight, taste the moisture in the air. Even in her depleted state, this form was such a powerful symbol for her that she almost felt physical.

  Almost. Such was the curse of the brujos.

  She crossed the beach and climbed gradually uphill to the place she loved, the caves. She entered one she had visited numerous times, and half a mile in, she paused in front of the petroglyphs. No one knew for sure who had drawn these extraordinary images. The elders in her tribe believed the petroglyphs were thousands of years old, created by a culture that existed long before the Quechuans, the Incas, perhaps as far back as the Paleo-Indian era. Even she was not that old.

  The story the images told haunted her. All of them—brujos and humans alike—were only as real as the stories they lived. It didn’t matter whether their stories were good or bad, tedious or carefree, defined by love or hatred, good or evil. It didn’t matter if the stories were political or religious, about families or loners or aliens from Pluto. They were all aliens—to each other and to themselves. They created stories to explore who they were and what they might become.

  And at least part of her story was told in these frames. She could never move beyond the implications of what it might mean. There she was, a bruja depicted as a smudge of dark ash, running with a wolf or a dog who became, in the next frame, the man she had loved before Ben, the man Nomad had been. Over there, drawings depicted the last battle between the brujos and the chasers. And here were images that depicted the future, several possible versions, nothing set in stone. Whoever had painted these images—shamans, seers, the light chasers themselves, or some ultimate prophet or being—could see only possibilities this far into the future.

  “Waves of probability” the quantum physicists called it. Her tribe had one such scientist, a man obsessed with the puzzles and mysteries of the universe. His rage at the scientific community had triggered a massive heart attack at the age of sixty and had brought him to her tribe and kept him here. He had no desire to return to physical life, where his peers had considered him a lunatic, his theories too far out there to be taken seriously. So now he worked as assiduously for the brujos as he once had worked for science in the physical world. But such luminaries among the brujos were rare.

  They had no Einsteins, Picassos, Beethovens, Kerouacs, Hesses. A few poets joined them from time to time, but always moved on. The politicians and CEOs who arrived were an obnoxious bunch, control freaks with axes to grind, and they rarely lasted long among her kind. Prime ministers, presidents, cabinet members, dictators, popes and priests, rabbis and ministers, evangelicals and crazies: the brujos had seen them all. Decades ago, a Dalai Lama had appeared among the brujos—not as one of them, but to understand them. He had been in the between and no brujo had seized him. A few hours among her people had convinced him he had seen the face of evil and he had dived back into his body.

  Those who stayed with the brujos for any length of time tended to be rebellious souls who had chafed against the conventions of the time into which they were born. Some had been famous in the physical world, most had not. Some had held positions of power or influence, most had not. Many were ordinary people like herself whose hopes and dreams had been dashed by circumstances or their own blunders. They had died young or suddenly. Or both. About half believed in some sort of afterlife. A quarter did not. The last quarter hadn’t even thought about it. But the numbers of brujos had grown so great in the last fifty years that she was no longer certain about her statistics. Maybe the majority of the more recent brujos believed in nothing except their own rage, intolerance, racism, envy, cruelty, and sadism.

  Dominica ran her warrior hand over the rock, over the panel of the wolf/dog, then over the man he became. Cool, even to her flickering touch. It seemed that the ancient rock came alive, vibrating through her warrior fingertips and igniting such sorrow in her warrior heart that she began to weep, then sob.

  Then she was on her knees before these images, her form flickering, weakened by her surrender to such shattering emotions.

  Fuck them. Fuck all of them.

  She lifted her head, swiped at her eyes, reared up and screamed, “You will never defeat us, drive us out.”

  Her voice echoed throughout the cave, raging but impotent. Then she threw off the warrior form and fled.

  Five

  It rained for three days, a cold, steady drizzle that kep
t them in the cottage. Tess was fine with it, but felt disappointed that nothing more happened between her and Ian.

  She suspected the intimacy they had shared on the bus, those promising exploratory kisses, had happened too quickly for him. Or maybe Ian just wasn’t interested in anything more. Whatever the reason, she was too worn out to think about sex, to look for her lost cell phone, too tired to do much of anything but sleep and read. She felt as if she had been injected with sludge and couldn’t remember altitude ever affecting her like this.

  The cottage lacked television, but had a large library. During the day, she and Ian read propped up on the two couches in the living room, near the fireplace, their reading broken up by conversation. At first, it was impersonal—books and movies, their travels, jobs, the inclement weather. It gradually grew more personal—his father’s suicide, her father’s death from cancer, his divorce, her atrophied relationship with Dan, his erratic relationship with Casey O’Toole, an English professor. They were equally comfortable discussing the inconsequential, as if they had been together for years and were accustomed to sharing such small details.

  It was obvious that the altitude had zapped them and eventually they would have to leave the cottage to replenish their supplies. But neither of them seemed in any hurry to venture outside or to request separate cottages.

  Whiskers, the tuxedo cat, hung around the cottage for the first day, either curled up in Tess’s lap or snoozing next to Nomad in front of the fireplace. Periodically, Nomad would lick and preen the cat, but eventually Whiskers slipped outside and probably moved on to another cottage. The dog left every so often and usually returned with a juicy bone or some other treat.