Wisps
By Ryan Crocker
*****
Wisps
Copyright © 2011 Dangereye Inc.
Panic had set in nearly three hours ago. Now it lingered, intensified with each new burst of gunfire. No one had given him a status update for more than an hour. When the fighting started, staffers and military officers continually streamed in. Now, his frantic pressing of the intercom button brought no one.
Another explosion shook the room. The gold plaque on the wall by his desk crashed to the floor. He stared down at his inscribed name, Gabriel Ramirez Ventura, reflecting that he would now be remembered in Mexican history as the President who lost the drug war.
Another boom, another crash. His wife’s photo fell. Ramirez almost smiled. His wife was dead. One good thing to come out of this mess. The Narcotraficantes had kidnapped her early in the war, thinking that her husband would do anything to save her. Ramirez had laughed at their demands and hung up the phone. Ten minutes later, he was on television, decrying the monsters that had killed his beloved wife.
A gut-wrenching scream tore through the palace. Another casualty, some poor staffer, shot dead. Or maybe dying slowly and painfully. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t mind the loss, but now it meant one less buffer between him and the advancing narcos.
Ramirez frantically pressed the intercom button again. He was a man who needed to give orders, lived to give orders, but soon he would be taking them from his enemies. Men with guns had always been there to protect him, to obey him. Now, he’d lost them to the men with bigger guns.
An hour passed, and then another. It sounded like all the ammunition in the world was being shot off right outside his window. Crouching on the floor, Ramirez fought the urge to wrap his arms around his head. Terrified as he was, he wanted to look dignified when the bastards finally found him.
And then… silence, like someone had pushed a cosmic mute button. The absence of sound was in a way even more frightening than the screams and gunfire. Ramirez froze, sure that if he moved or spoke, the cacophony of death would come rushing back. But it didn’t.
He stood up and glanced out the window. Instead of the courtyard and Chapultepec Park, he saw a swirling gray mass. At times it looked like dense fog, and then like a murky liquid.
Softly he eased the office door open. No one. He stepped through the doorway, pausing to brush his fingertips against the ivory chess set that sat atop an end table. In spite of all the explosions and shaking, a single black king stood in its place, surrounded by his toppled minions. Ramirez took courage from that. He liked to think of himself as a king.
His father had run a modest import business and often told his son stories about their ancestors, how they were linked to the royal family of Aragon. As a child Ramirez used to pretend he was one of those kings; in his play he would shout, “Obey me or die!” He hated to play alone and liked to have other children around that he could dominate and command. The more, the better.
As he grew he became terribly afraid that he would wind up a nobody like his father, and determined to get ahead in life by any means necessary. Now his dreams of power and influence had come true. He had amassed a large retinue of advisors, staff, and servants to do his bidding as well as numerous important people who owed him favors. But the pleasure of his achievement was tempered by the growing realization that his power came at a price. And he was never sure how costly it would become.
Feeling a bizarre mixture of fear, curiosity, and anger, he wandered through the entire building, opening doors, calling out names, and gazing through windows. Some of the windows of the Presidential Palace were shattered, and in one corner parts of the wall had caved in, leaving huge gaps. Through them, Ramirez saw more of the gray expanse. He wanted to reach out and touch it, but something held him back.
He thought he would find more people hiding… at least a few soldiers. Instead, there was not a soul in the building. Every exit led to gray oblivion. There were bodies, though: men and women, soldiers and narcos. Ramirez returned shakily to his office and crouched down in the same corner where he’d been waiting and hiding for most of the day.
Two hours had passed when the door suddenly opened and an unfamiliar man stepped in. Short and dark with Mayan features and a prominent nose, he looked like he was from Oaxaca or Chiapas, the two southern states that still had a large indigenous population. But Ramirez didn’t have anyone like that on staff, and if it had been a military man, he would have been wearing a uniform.
Most unsettling was that he carried a wooden bow and arrows tipped with black ooze. Ramirez had seen diorama figures in the National Museum of Anthropology depicting Mayans with their bows and their poison-dart-frog tipped arrows, but he never expected to see one of them come to life and wander into his office. The man held the bow as if he absolutely knew how to use it. An assassin hired by the Narcos? No, they wouldn’t go through all that trouble when a simple bullet would suffice.
The man caught sight of Ramirez and stood completely still. A moment later he was joined by two other men of similar stature, one also with a bow, and the other carrying a spear. Somehow, Ramirez didn’t feel threatened by these men.
Ramirez pulled himself to his feet, brushed some imaginary dust from his pantsuit. “It appears that I am at your mercy.”
“Do you rule this land? Are you the King?” the man with the spear asked, his Spanish oddly accented, like a Chiapaneco with a speech impediment.
Ramirez raised his eyebrows slightly. “I am Gabriel Ramirez Ventura, President of Mexico.”
“Mexico.” The man repeated the word as if it was the first time he’d spoken it.
“Who are you? Are you here to kill me?”
“No.”
Ramirez sensed that these men—warriors was the word that came to mind—were indeed not here to harm him. He ventured to ask them about the swirling gray mass outside.
“Can you explain it?” he asked, pointing toward the window.
The spear-carrying warrior gestured to Ramirez to follow him into the hallway. Ramirez obliged, and the other warriors fell into step behind him. After several turns, Ramirez was directed upstairs toward the wing containing his personal living quarters.
Upon reaching this uppermost floor of the Presidential Palace, he walked through the door of his bedroom. He found himself standing on a floor made of the same gray substance that surrounded the house.
Looking down at his feet, it was as if he could see into the floor, a depth that appeared much greater than the height of the palace. The two warriors with bows flanked Ramirez, with the spear-carrier behind him. As they walked forward into the fog, Ramirez could see a transparent dome was moving with the group, keeping the gray substance at bay. “Like fish in a bowl,” he muttered to himself. The warriors said nothing.
At last the little group stopped. Their location looked indistinguishable from any other in the murk, but soon, five blue lights appeared just outside the dome. They flashed and blinked, but Ramirez could not understand the meaning of the display.
The three warriors silently prostrated themselves before the lights. Ramirez considered that it might be politically expedient to do the same, but he didn’t yet know who or what he was dealing with.
The light in front of him spoke. “You are the leader of this land? The King?”
“I am Gabriel Ramirez Ventura, President of Mexico.”
The light seemed to blink in acknowledgement. “Some years ago, we borrowed your people. We now return them. You have our gratitude and our favor.”
Ramirez glanced at the three men surrounding him. “I do not know these men. I ha
ve no knowledge of such an agreement.”
“The King who made the agreement was called Temoac. He ruled a stronghold in your southern jungles.”
“Temoac?” The name rang a faint bell. “How long ago was this?”
“One thousand three hundred orbits of your planet around its sun.”
Ramirez looked at the warriors. “These men are ancient Mayans?”
“Call them what you will. We came here needing beings to serve us. Our physical forms are fragile, and after millenniums of peace we were attacked by a life form that discovered us. Temoac agreed to lend us his mightiest warriors. In return, we promised to give him any gift he chose when we were done with them.
“Temoac is long dead.”
“Then we come to you. You rule the land Temoac once inhabited. You are his successor. We no longer have need for your warriors and so we return them to you and offer any aid you may require of us, Ramirez, King of Mexico.”
Ramirez blinked. Then he smiled.