“Dillon, look at me!”
It was Maddy again. She grabbed him and rolled him over, pinning his shoulders. “Focus on me!”
“No! No—I can’t be here!” But it was already too late, because he could hear—he could feel beneath the reviving grass, a deeper gathering of life.
HOLDING DILLON DOWN WAS like gripping a live wire. His iridescence burned through Maddy, an intense sensation her body could not decipher as either pleasure or pain, but an amalgam of both. Then when she heard the first voice, it caught Maddy off guard, and she loosened her grip on Dillon just enough for him to push her off and scramble away. He didn’t get far; just a few yards, before he crumpled by a tombstone, weeping and slowly shaking his head like a bull struck by a car.
“Hey!” someone had shouted. “Hey, is anybody there?” She looked around. The voice was muffled and distant. She couldn’t place the direction from which it came.
Then there was a second voice and another, and another. “What is this?” “Somebody answer me!” “Hello?!”
And it dawned on Maddy with a jagged, penetrating chill that these voices were not coming from the church or the woods, or nearby buildings. They came from beneath her feet.
“What’s happening?” “Help me!” “Who’s out there?”
It began as confusion and curiosity, then when some rudimentary understanding kicked in, their cries turned fearful, their fists pounding in the dark upon the satin-lined caskets that confined them. At first it was just a few, but it soon grew into a chorus of screaming for release beneath the tons of earth that covered them.
“No no no!” Dillon cried, covering his ears. “Make them stop! Make them stop!”
Maddy stood there, dumbfounded. She had no response for this. Nothing in her tactical training had prepared her for this.
Suddenly a rhythmic roar swooped down from above, for a brief moment overwhelming the cries of the underchorus before it passed. Maddy knew it was a helicopter even before she saw it. Generic gray, with no markings. It buzzed the treetops, then set down in a clearing a hundred yards away.
Then, when she turned back to the graveyard there was a flak-jacketed, rifle-armed force—at least a dozen men—storming the graveyard from two directions. Once in range, they brought up their rifles and took aim. Some were trained on her, but most were on Dillon. She went to Dillon, shielding him with her body, trying to keep him from making sudden moves, because he was still within himself, oblivious to it all. And beneath them, the chorus grew in desperate insanity.
A figure approached from the helicopter. He wore a dark suit, and had a familiar stride. Even though she had a clear view of him as he approached, it wasn’t until he stepped into the graveyard that she locked on his identity. It was Elon Tessic.
TO ELON TESSIC, DISGUISE was a simple trick of perception; once he became defined by his white attire, he merely had to shed it to become invisible. Even personal friends had failed to recognize him when he wore anything other than pressed Mediterranean white. Today he was just another man in a dark suit.
As he approached, Tessic found his overzealous mercenaries to have far too much firepower for his liking, so he signaled to their leader, a militia-bred mercenary named Davitt, to lower their weapons.
Even before he stepped into the graveyard, Elon could hear the distraught voices underfoot, and feel the waves of psychic energy strobing off of Dillon. It was intimidating to say the least, but not entirely unexpected. Once he had stepped over the fence, he approached Maddy, whose confusion had already taken a turn toward anger.
“Tessic!” she screamed. “You son of a bitch.”
“My men will escort you to my helicopter,” he said calmly.
“If they come near us, I’ll break their necks.”
“I have no doubt you would . . . but if you decide to stay here, I can guarantee that your military friends won’t be far behind.”
She hesitated, studying him. “You’re not working for them?”
“I’m an independent contractor,” he told her. “Today I’m here to help.”
She threw a glance at the armed men around them. “Are they?”
Elon grabbed one of the mercenaries’ rifles, opened the barrel, and showed it to Maddy.
“Tranquilizer darts, in case we encountered your resistance.”
The moment of silence between them was punctuated by the muffled voices hopelessly calling from the grave.
“We must get Dillon away from this place,” he told her. “Do you hear around you? Do you understand?”
Without answering, Maddy knelt back down to Dillon, who had been subdued by the voices of those he had called back from the dead. She helped him to his feet and threw an untrusting glance at Tessic, but in the end, got Dillon out of the graveyard, and moved him toward the helicopter that waited in the nearby field.
A dozen yards away, a scraping of concrete drew Tessic’s attention. A man labored to push up the concrete lid of his own crypt, his fingertips already raw from the task. A scene from the Haunted Mansion, but far more disturbing.
Disturbing, thought Tessic, but not frightening—for these were not ghouls, but ordinary people, unable to know the cause of their situation. Not comprehending their own death, much less their call back to life.
“Help me. Please,” said the man, straining against the concrete lid. “Someone’s put me down here . . . someone’s buried me alive. . . .”
A few of Tessic’s mercenaries, now fearful themselves, looked at Tessic for direction. Even Davitt was affected by it. “What do we do?” he asked.
“Go help him!” Tessic ordered.
Two men forced off the lid of the crypt and it tumbled to the ground. They pulled out a middle-aged man in a tan, pin-striped suit that was pressed and clean. The style was at least thirty years out of date.
“Who in blazes are you?” the man asked, when Tessic approached. Since no response would have made sense to him, Tessic chose not to answer. Instead he turned to Davitt. “We’ll take him with us as well.”
“What about the others?”
Tessic looked around the graveyard. The voices were growing weaker. There were only two crypts with lids that could be removed. The rest were earthen graves. Even if he had had a hundred men with shovels, he couldn’t have unearthed a single one of them before they all suffocated. So Tessic had his men remove the occupant of the second crypt, then forced himself to listen to the other voices, giving them at the very least, the dignity of a witness.
He could hear in their fading voices a mix of emotions. There were those who had some rudimentary understanding, and accepted this moment as a gift, and those who saw it as a curse. There were the sounds of love, comfort, and surprise between husbands and wives whose departures had been years apart. There were also wails full of the agonized loneliness of those who had no one to comfort them in this all too brief hiatus from eternity.
“Yitgadal V’yitkadash sh’mei raba . . .” Elon began. It was the mourner’s kaddish—the Jewish prayer for the dead. He said it without the required minyan of ten. He said it alone, with the same conviction he had afforded his parents, his sisters. Loved ones who died old, and those who died before their time. He intoned the holy words with reverence, and respect. And when he was done, he could no longer hear their voices. The dead were dead once more.
When he looked up, he saw a half a dozen spectators across the street, keeping a safe distance from the armed men. None were close enough to know who or what they saw.
“What languages do you know?” he asked Davitt.
“English . . . German.”
Tessic tried to hide his distaste. German would actually work to his advantage. “Go to those people. If any of them have cameras, break them. Confiscate their phones as well. Tell them to leave—but do it in German. Everything must be done in German.”
Davitt accepted his orders, and took two men with him.
Tessic could only assume that the intelligence of every nation now knew that Dillon
had escaped. When the authorities came, these townsfolk would tell of an unmarked helicopter, a man in a dark suit—and a SWAT team spouting German. The trajectory of blame wouldn’t even come close to Tessic.
Satisfied, he strode back toward the helicopter which would deliver Dillon, Maddy, and himself, out of harm’s way.
20. TANGO IN FALSE LIGHT
* * *
LOURDES WAS CERTAIN SHE HAD SUFFERED A STROKE; THAT her hedonistic lifestyle of excess had hemorrhaged an artery in her brain. Darkness enveloped her peripheral vision, and although she never actually felt her legs give out, the bruising slap of the deck against her face told her that she had collapsed. Her senses all but gone, she awaited fearfully a lapse of consciousness, and the moment when the darkness would close in, her heart would heave itself still, and her life would end. But it did not happen. Instead her heart pounded so forcefully it sent veiny streaks of lightning across her imploded vision, beat after beat. Pain in her eyes and ears crested with every pulse. Then the pain found a home in the base of her neck, and radiated from there to her temples, and out to her extremities. She lay like this in throbbing paralysis for at least ten minutes. Then gradually her vision began to return, and her muscles began to obey her commands. She brought a hand to her face, feeling the pressure of blood swelling the bruise, then pulled herself up into a sitting position. Her body felt heavy and ponderous, as it had in the days when she was obese. She had to look around to remind herself where she was; her private sun deck of the Blue Horizon, overlooking the lido deck. Up above the cloud-speckled sky was the same, but she knew something had fundamentally changed about the world; something intangible that she chose not to consider right now. At this moment just getting to her feet took enough of her concentration.
To her right were a pair of grossly overweight crewmen that had been waxing the wooden railing of her private deck. One struggled to his feet, the other still lay on the deck, not moving at all. A god-awful sound pulled her attention to the left, where her latest boy toy crouched on all fours. He was a twenty-year-old blond, unencumbered by intelligence—an Adonis she had taken to her bed, if only to prove to herself that she wasn’t looking for a harem of dark-haired Michael Lipranski look-alikes, as Winston had claimed. Now her blond boy hunched on his knees, retching up what looked like pulverized crab meat. The sight of it quickly removed him from her list of lovers.
She stood, gripping the guard rail for balance, and looked to the pool deck below. At the far end of the deck, the breakfast buffet had been in full swing, but now it looked like a blast zone. Her frightened, moaning passengers hauled themselves to the nearest chairs, not even concerned with the plates that had broken on the ground. It was difficult for Lourdes to discern whether this devastating event had hit all of them, or if it had only hit her, and the others aboard were just mimicking her own physiological response.
A few feet away, the conscious crewman checked the pulse of his fallen crewmate, then turned to Lourdes, his eyes a study in terror.
“He’s dead,” the crewman said.
Although Lourdes was no stranger to death, neither did she wish to linger with it. “Take him below,” she said, not sure where down below the body should be taken, only that it should be taken there. She assumed someone would deal with it, and it would cease to be her problem.
“Please . . . he needs a priest,” the crewman said.
A priest? Lourdes had neither the time nor capacity for such compassion. “Take him!” she ordered.
The man obeyed without further word, dragging the body out of sight, and out of mind.
What happened to you, Lourdes? Winston’s words and that doleful expression on his face came back to her, like the hint of a conscience crawling back from wherever she had banished it to. She knew full well a conscience came with heavy baggage of regret, and she was determined to regret nothing, not now, not ever. She suppressed thoughts of Winston, until they, too, were out of mind.
Shielding her eyes from the sun, she looked at the shores around the ship. By the look of it, they were in a lake larger than the first lake they had encountered in the canal, but the sea was nowhere in sight. She put in a call to the bridge, and demanded to speak with the canal pilot, whose job it was to shuttle them to the Atlantic.
“Three more locks, señorita,” the pilot told her with a tremor of fear in his voice. “But the . . . the fainting spell, it set us a little off course. We need to reposition the ship before we bring her through the Gatun Locks.”
Lourdes sighed, exasperated, and told him to get to it. She had grown accustomed to the open sea, and found the canal to be constricting and claustrophobic, even at its widest points. Now that sensation of being closed in was even stronger, and she was anxious to reach the Atlantic.
She left the open deck, returning to her suite. Although her cabin stewards stumbled over one another to assist her in her slightest needs, she waved them off. Her head pounded too much for her to bother with anyone right now.
Only after she had lain down on her bed and tried to relax did her thoughts settle enough for her to parse from the pain what had happened.
The more she considered it, the more she was certain; there was no mistaking the signature of the psychic wave that had floored her. The three performers from her dreams had left the stage, taking their act on the road.
Not my problem! she told herself, summoning up a healthy dose of protective anger. Dillon set this all in motion—let him struggle with it; I’m on vacation.
Twenty minutes later, she was informed that a pilot ship was approaching from the Gatun station. For some reason, a new canal pilot was requesting permission to come aboard.
“One pilot,” Lourdes asked the captain, “or three?”
The captain apologized, and explained that it was only one pilot, but that, for some reason, he was bringing his family along with him. “Shall we let them on?” the captain asked. After more than two months he had fully accepted Lourdes’s authority over him, and deferred to her on everything.
Lourdes gave permission for the new pilot and his escorts to come aboard, knowing that the Gatun Locks would not be setting her free until she faced her trio of players.
THE S.S. BLUE HORIZON left the queue of ships anchored in Gatun Lake, and Lourdes put on her most festive party dress. She received her visitors in the observation lounge, overlooking the bow of the ship. She made sure the lounge was well populated and full of chatter, determined to maintain the atmosphere of a party throughout her confrontation with the three. Their meeting would be a simple chat on an ordinary cruise. She would not let it intimidate her.
When they arrived, and were shown to their table, she almost laughed. They were not even close to what she expected. A small gray-haired Panamanian man with weathered skin, a bat-ugly woman with bad hair, and a child.
“Welcome aboard the Blue Horizon,” Lourdes said. The man shook her hand, the woman smiled dismally through her cleft lip, and the boy’s attention was lost on the view through the slanted glass window. “Ichole!” he said, the Spanish equivalent of “wow.”
“Would you prefer English, or Spanish?” the man asked.
“English,” she told him.
“Then you have to excuse the accents,” the man said. “Our speaking, it is limited by the experience of . . . of . . .” He turned to the boy. “Como diçe?”
“Human hosts,” the boy answered.
“Yes. We are limited by the experience of our human hosts.”
She was stunned by how blatant they were in declaring their supernatural nature, as if it were nothing unusual. She offered to converse in Spanish, but they refused.
“We learn speak more very soon,” said the split-lipped woman, who had the least command of the language.
“Although we are limited by the past of these bodies,” the man said, “our future has no limit.”
The cocktail waiter brought Lourdes her usual, and she stirred the white Colada into the pink daiquiri, but didn’t drink. Best to kee
p all of her faculties. She offered her guests a round, but they declined.
“Pleasures later,” the man said.
“Alcohol es caca,” the boy said, sticking out his tongue. “Grandpa says so.”
Memories of his host? thought Lourdes. Were those memories an asset, or a hindrance? Whatever these creatures were, did their newly acquired bodies weaken them? How much danger was she in just being with them?
Since they were frank, she chose to be frank as well. “You talk of host bodies,” Lourdes said. “Are you spirit parasites, or spirit predators?”
The boy giggled at the question, but none of them answered.
“Well, what are you?”
They looked to one another, and the boy reached out, gently touching Lourdes’s face. She recoiled from his touch. The boy was unbothered by her reaction. “You must soon learn to love us, I think,” the boy said.
“And why would I ever love you?” Lourdes sneered.
“Because,” said the boy. “We are angels.”
THE BLUE HORIZON ANCHORED for the rest of the day in the lake, drawing attention and suspicion from canal authorities, who already knew the strange reputation of the rogue ship. They were marginally eased by a spread of stalls and outright lies given them by Carlos Ceballos, their own most respected canal pilot.
Lourdes dined with the “angels” in the main dining room at her own table but surrounded by a full seating of guests, never allowing these creatures to get her alone. During the meal, she sensed that neither their breathing, nor their heartbeats were in synch with hers, or with anyone else’s on the ship. Everything about the three was under their own control. It left her feeling vulnerable, unprotected.
Their conversation, which had been so direct in the lounge, lapsed into pleasantries around the dinner table. Apparently her guests had already learned the circular art of conversation.