The Hike

  “I am doing more for my family here than I possibly could at home. Men like us were born to explore. We have homes so that we can leave them. And if I die here on this path, I will have given my wife and children more glory and honor than I could ever give them by staying home, like a coward. Do you understand this?”

  “We should sleep.”

  “We should sleep, yes.”

  Cisco began snoring and Ben’s eyes remained wide open. Laid out in front of their sad little mat was Voris’s new abode, the curtain walls finished and the stone interior of the first floor nearly complete. Ben’s job at home was minding the money for a small construction firm, so he knew all about the raw materials of contract work: joists and tenons and struts. But he rarely laid hands on such things back then. Now he knew the raw materials of existence intimately.

  He fell asleep dreaming of burning the castle down.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE POISON

  Four more years passed. The labor and the hunger and the thirst and the soreness and the deathly midday heat and sweeping midnight cold were all working in concert to smash Ben. Every day his body stretched and compacted with the temperature, like a road about to buckle. His teeth were yellow and cracking. His skin had liver spots now. His beard had grown scraggly over the bottom half of his jagged scar. He had become a zombie himself: a hollowed-out remnant, hands now ghost white with dried mortar paste, brainless save for the urge to fulfill one primal need.

  But he wasn’t quite dead yet.

  Still obsessed with defeating Voris, he had taken to muttering passages from his old library to himself (“Curry powder; the dead tissue of another undead being; the dead, stewed tissue of a human”), Cisco eyeing him with grim concern. The sample bottle in the castle wall hadn’t yielded anything fruitful yet and Ben fell into a mania as he searched both his mind and the desert for the final elusive component.

  The castle was nearing completion, the turrets and flanking towers rising forty feet high and connected by parapet walks that Ben and Cisco had finished in exacting detail. Every morning, the pair would wake up and find the truck bed stocked with whatever construction materials were required for the job: wooden joists, long corner posts, iron spikes, ladders, flexible pine studs, a forge. The Smokes never took away Cisco’s bag, although the stranded explorer hadn’t amassed much of anything useful inside it: some clothes, a canteen, twigs of dried rosemary (Cisco would make tea with them on special occasions), some hardtack, a Bible, half a bottle of rancid ship brandy, his maps and journals (which he curiously refused to share with Ben), salt for fighting off the Skinless, and the precious sleeping mat. Cisco scored the mat after crossing a lake filled with man-eating anacondas. Then he had a sword fight with a spider whose body was a man’s head. That was what the path had decided were proper obstacles for him.

  One night, the two decided to celebrate Ben’s forty-eighth birthday. Bereft of a calendar, they chose the day arbitrarily and rejoiced with some extra hardtack, a sip of the brandy, and a song or two. Ben had taught Cisco modern music, and Cisco had taught Ben a handful of filthy sea shanties. They sang out loud as the Smokes watched, ruining the moment the way they always did. Emboldened by the brackish liquor, Ben stood up and talked directly to the ghosts.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m gonna kill both of you fuckers, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  They ignored him and kept staring. They were used to him mouthing off. Immune. He couldn’t kill them, so they let him run his yap all he pleased. In the end, they could always shut him up if they felt like it.

  Under the rearranged stars, Ben began sketching out another mural of his family in the sand: the phone shot, at the Chuck E. Cheese’s, with the family huddled around the cheap tablecloth. He was muttering to himself about the poison again when Cisco laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.

  “There’s nothing in that barrel, my friend. You have to let it go.”

  “No.”

  “You have tried everything. This is noble but nobility has its limits.”

  “There’s one thing left and I can’t see it. I know it’s there. It’s hiding in plain sight and I just can’t . . .”

  He drew his wife’s hand as he remembered it from the photo, with her thumb awkwardly rubbing her ring finger on the same hand.

  Her ring.

  “Cisco.”

  “Qué?”

  Ben pointed to the outline of Teresa’s hand in the sand.

  “This is your wife, yes?”

  “She’s wearing her ring,” Ben said.

  “You’ve tried your rings. Both of them.”

  “My wedding ring is stainless steel. My father’s ring is brass.”

  “So?”

  “My wife’s wedding ring is gold, Cisco. The Producer is telling us that we need gold for the barrel. And we have gold.”

  He eyed Cisco’s tooth. The Smokes watched indifferently as Cisco backed away from Ben.

  “My friend, nothing will work.”

  “We haven’t tried everything,” Ben said. His mouth hung open like a hungry dog’s.

  “You cannot have my tooth.”

  Ben got up and walked in the dark over to the worksite, reaching into a bucket of tools and rooting around. Cisco trailed behind, gripping his sword in its sheath. The Smokes kept their distance, watching the two men for sport as the sun began to rise in the background.

  Ben found a pair of pliers in the bucket. Cisco drew the sword.

  “Cisco, there’s no other way.”

  “Stay away from me.”

  “Please, Cisco. Please. You have to give it to me.”

  “My gold is mine.”

  “GIVE ME THE TOOTH.”

  He lunged at Cisco and the Spaniard thrust his sword out. But Ben dodged it, grabbed Cisco by the wrist, and pulled him closer. With a significant advantage in height and weight, he twisted Cisco’s arm and loosed the sword. Cisco bit down hard on his shoulder and both men fell to the ground, wrestling around.

  “You cannot have the tooth!” Cisco cried.

  “We’ll never get out of here! Don’t you fucking get it?!”

  “It’s mine!”

  “What does it matter if we die here, Cisco? I can’t die here! You’re my friend and I love you. Please don’t let me die in this shithole, Cisco. Please. Think about God.”

  “You don’t believe in God! You are a heathen!”

  “I am a good man. If it were my tooth, I’d give it to you.”

  Cisco relented for a moment. “Then that is what you will do.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a man of your word, no? You take my tooth, and then I take yours.”

  “But mine’s not gold.”

  “Show me you are a man of sacrifice. Show me how far you will go to prove yourself to God.”

  Ben’s eyeballs bugged out as he drooled yellow onto Cisco’s tunic. “Tooth for a tooth, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You swear it?”

  “On the life of the queen.”

  Ben gave a reluctant nod. The Smokes approached as the two men got up and dusted themselves off. Ben held out a hand to the ghosts.

  “Not now, you pricks. We’re settling something.”

  The Smokes retreated half an inch as the men shook hands.

  “Who goes first?” Ben asked.

  “I will go first,” Cisco said. “I can trust you, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Ben took the pliers and slipped them over Cisco’s gold incisor.

  “You must be fast,” Cisco said.

  “I will,” Ben promised. “Do you want to give me a signal? Or do you just want me to get it over with?”

  “Get it over wi . . .”

  Ben clutched the pliers and gave them a firm twist and pull. The Spaniard made
no sound. No screams. No cries. No groans. He fixed his eyes on Ben as the blood gushed out from his gums and made the pliers slick in Ben’s already shaky hands. After sixty brutal seconds, the gold tooth was extracted. The pressure from the pliers had left a series of ridges in the soft metal. Ben dropped the pliers in horror.

  “I’m so sorry, Cisco.”

  Cisco calmly bent over and grabbed the bloodied tool off the ground.

  “Are you ready now?” he asked Ben.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to say yes out loud. He whimpered and closed his eyes as the explorer walked up to him and slipped the pliers over his perfectly healthy front tooth. There was a split second to dread the pull, and that dread was almost worse than what came next. Cisco yanked and the pain took over, shooting through Ben’s face like pure sound, deep and sharp and maddening. He could feel the root of his tooth stretching down within him, as deep as the tomato vines in Mrs. Blackwell’s garden, a seemingly endless network of exposed wiring now electrified.

  He did not possess Cisco’s tolerance for pain. He made sounds that shook the sands. He seized and twisted and wailed. When it was over, he lay prone on the ground for five minutes, leaking hot blood, feeling around the exposed socket with his dry tongue. Cisco felt the enamel of Ben’s tooth between his calloused fingertips.

  “Now you are a man of sacrifice.”

  The Smokes came and dropped two shovels at the men’s feet.

  “Fuck you,” Ben said to them.

  They started in on him and he quickly got back up, walking into the castle.

  “I’m working! I’m working! I have no fucking joint compound here. Do us a favor and get some joint compound.”

  One Smoke flew off while the other prodded Cisco to start working and followed him up the inner staircase of the castle. Ben was now alone for a moment, parked close to the interior wall. He quickly moved the loose rock and found his water bottle filled with sample poison.

  When he dropped Cisco’s gold tooth in, the solution glowed bright green.

  He quickly tucked the little bottle into his waistband. The Smokes and Cisco returned to the lower level of the castle. Ben gave Cisco a firm nod. They had their poison.

  This happened to be another sixth day. At lunch, with the working poison still tenuously hidden inside his waistband, Ben saw Voris approaching, his leathery wings spread out and perfectly still, content to glide along with the wind. No flapping necessary at all. Ben took his water break and Cisco did likewise. They sat in the sand, near the little hole with the jar and the seed. The wind whistled through Ben’s new tooth gap. When the Smokes looked skyward, he took out his water bottle and added it to the pickle jar, watching the insides of it light up. Then he grabbed his hard brown seed and struck it down.

  On the sand now sat a handheld vacuum.

  “Holy shit.”

  Cisco looked down at the vacuum and nearly yelped with surprise at the transformation, but Ben quickly covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Shhhh!”

  They threw the vacuum in the hole and covered it in a thin layer of red sand.

  “We can’t do anything during the day,” Ben whispered.

  “I agree,” said Cisco.

  “I think he can see through their eyes.”

  “Yes. We must strike at night. What is this thing we bury?”

  “A vacuum.”

  “What is a vacuum?”

  “It’s better if you see it in action than if I explain it.”

  They went back to work, their faces still smeared with dried blood from the morning’s amateur dentistry. The rest of that afternoon was a study in torture—less physical than having a tooth pulled but no less pronounced—as they stacked stones and glued them with mortar, trying to remain as productive as usual so that everything would appear normal. By the look in Ben’s eyes, Cisco knew his friend was delirious, almost rapturous. Ben was snickering as he labored, driven insane by the idea that escape was so close for them.

  “You know what? We celebrated my birthday last night,” said Ben aloud. “Tonight, we celebrate yours, amigo.”

  “A celebration for me?”

  “Shit, yeah. Why not?”

  The Smokes said nothing. Darkness fell, the mean wind sweeping back over the flat desert. Again the two explorers toasted and drank from the rancid brandy bottle, although this time, Ben and Cisco only pretended to take swigs, letting their pink backwash slide back into the bottle. Cisco’s bag was directly over the hole where the vacuum was buried.

  As casually as possible, Ben said, “I’m putting this rotgut back. We’ve had too much.” With one hand, he slipped the brandy back into the bag. With the other, he dug into the sand underneath the bag and grabbed the vacuum. By the time he had it out, the Smokes could see that Ben was acting with a bit too much purpose. They sailed toward him. And when they saw the vacuum, they flew into a rage.

  “Cisco, RUN!”

  The explorer got up and raced along the side of the castle, with one of the ghosts peeling away to capture and smother him. Just as the other Smoke was about to reach Ben, he held up the vacuum and flicked the power switch. The vacuum sucked up the Smoke within seconds, trapping it inside an opaque plastic chamber, leaving it wild with anger, practically knocking at the plastic to get out.

  The other Smoke caught Cisco and held him down, stuffing his lungs with tar and ash, when Ben ran up behind it and flicked the switch again. But before he could trap it, the Smoke turned away from the Spaniard and began smothering Ben instead. Ben dropped the vacuum to the ground as the ghost blanketed him. This was the end. The Smoke had seen enough. He was really going to choke Ben to death this time. Ben’s throat felt stripped. His mutilated gums burned. The Smoke was reaching deeper down inside his frail body than it ever had, ready to end him.

  But it didn’t count on Cisco recovering so quickly. The Spaniard hopped up and saw the vacuum sitting on the ground. He pushed the RELEASE button by accident and set the first Smoke free. It immediately pounced on Cisco, forming a brute fist to knock the vacuum away. But Cisco held on and clipped the plastic dust chamber shut. Then he flicked the right switch and sucked up the first Smoke once more, its eyes bright with fury as it disappeared through the handheld’s anteater nozzle.

  Then Cisco came up behind the second Smoke and sucked it right up. SHOOOOOOOOOOOMP!

  There they were. The two demon fuckers, trapped in that little Dustbuster. The chamber shook and rattled with their collective outrage. If they could have screamed, they would have.

  Ben was still on the ground, gasping for air. Cisco grabbed his bag, then ran over and offered a hand.

  “They’re gone,” he told Ben.

  “We can go?”

  “We can go.”

  He shot to his feet, jump-started back to life. Then he looked at the tiny vacuum and beamed, smiling so wide that his cheeks ached.

  “CISCO!” he cried, shaking his friend’s shoulders. “Cisco, you magnificent bastard!”

  They grabbed their shovels and dug a hole in the ground. They had grown quite proficient at digging. Then they placed the vacuum in the hole and covered it up. The Smokes would only see blackness all through this night, and for the rest of forever. Ben picked up the glowing pickle jar, then took Cisco by the collar and led him to the truck. It was unlocked. The key was in the ignition. He put a bewildered Cisco in the passenger seat and buckled his seat belt for him, then hopped up into the other side of the cab.

  “My friend, do you know how to . . .”

  “I sure as hell do.”

  Ben gunned the engine and they blasted off into the desert night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  VORIS

  Cisco uttered prayers in Spanish as Ben stomped on the gas and the truck soared over 100 miles an hour, with the lines of the path clear in front of them and the spires of their castle sinkin
g down in the rearview. They sped into a patch of dunes and the truck got air after each bump, landing back down with a THUD that made the explorer cry out for Jesus.

  “You can drink that brandy for real now,” Ben told him. Cisco did as instructed.

  After a few sips of the calvados, Cisco stopped praying and began asking questions.

  “Where are we going, my friend?”

  “To kill Voris.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The path will take us to him.”

  “You believe.”

  “I don’t require faith for this.”

  “What is this vessel?”

  “This is a truck.”

  “How does it go so fast?”

  “Gas, baby. Gas.”

  “I must bring it back to Spain.”

  “When we’re done with Voris, you can do whatever the hell you want with it. Check the glove compartment and see if there’s anything useful inside of it.”

  “The what?”

  Ben pointed to the underside of the dash. Cisco unlatched the glove compartment. Inside was a syringe with a handwritten label that said CORTISONE. Ben grabbed the needle, popped the sheath off, and jammed it into his bad knee.

  “Holy shit! WOO-HOO!”

  Now they were doing 110. Also inside the glove box they found ripe oranges and cold bottles of water and pouches of air-dried beef and fresh-shelled pistachios. And a seed. One single hard brown seed. It rolled out and Ben lunged to catch it before it hit the floor mat, the syringe still poking out of his leg. The truck swerved and tipped, and Cisco crossed himself as Ben violently pulled the wheel back to keep them on the road. He pocketed the seed in his tattered work pants. Then he pointed to the food.

  “We share,” Ben said. They feasted as Ben upped the truck to 120, desperate to outrun the night. When Ben slid his water bottle into the cup holder between their seats, Cisco marveled, as if the Virgin Mary had appeared before him.

  Suddenly, Ben panicked.

  “Cisco, did you get my rock?”

  “Your rock?”