The Hike (16 page)

A week later, during a water break, while the Smokes looked up at Voris, Ben quickly bored a hole in the sand near his tent and stashed his pickle jar inside, the poison still missing its last, vital ingredient. He threw the seed down hard on the ground and nothing happened. It stayed a seed. Panicked, he threw the seed into the hole with the pickle jar and covered it up. The seed wasn't ready to sprout right now. It worked on some kind of existential time release. But he had learned how to be patient. After all, he had years to play with. He could wait until he had the timing exactly right.

Every so often, he'd scream unholy things at the Smokes, or make a frenzied run at the pickup, and they would push him down and fill his lungs with enough toxins to make him beg for mercy. They made for horrible company. He missed Crab. He even missed Fermona, in his own twisted way. He missed the sound of another living being. A truly living being, and not the spooks haunting his every waking moment.

 • • • 

Six years passed.

One morning, Ben was mixing the concrete powder with water in a wheelbarrow (provided by his captors) when a stiff wind came and triggered a sand slide. He watched the wall of the foundation hole quiver and then quickly collapse, a metric ton of sand crashing back down right at his feet. It would have to be re-excavated. He picked up a nearby shovel and hurled it across the pit. The Smokes immediately descended upon him.

“Fuck you!” he screamed at them. “You mute
fucks
! This thing would get built three times faster if you ever bothered to help. But do you? No. No, you sit there like the fucking puds you are and ride my jock. One day . . . one day I swear to God I will find a way to end you both.”

And they were just about to hold him down and choke him to death when they abruptly changed their minds. No, they had a better idea. They flew silently over to his tent perched on the edge of the pit. His home.

“Wait!” Ben cried. “I'm sorry. Listen, why don't we talk about this? Please don't.”

But it was too late. One of the Smokes produced a white flame from inside its noxious vapors and set the tent ablaze. The books, the drawings, the fox, the handprint, the bed, his bag and everything it contained—all of it burned. A plume of black smoke rose high up from the desert and it may as well have grown two eyes as well, it looked so malevolent. Ben fell to his knees and watched helplessly as the wind blew around the tiny, blackened bits of his former abode. The black ash fell softly down into the pit like hell-spawned snow, covering Ben in tatters of the only things left that he had held dear. He screamed at the Smokes until his face was ready to fall off.

The Smokes stared back at him. Ben was just about to charge at them when Voris came flying over the worksite.

He wasn't alone.

In his fearsome talons he was carrying something. A man. Voris swooped into the hole and laid the man gently on the bedrock, ten yards from Ben, then unfurled his wings and again flew out to the west, as he did every six days. The man clutched at his ribs in anguish, just as Ben had all those years ago. Ben rushed to help him up and lifted him to his feet, perhaps against his better judgment. The man
stood barely five feet tall, with long black hair and a single gold tooth and thick bushy mustache. He wore leather boots and short pants and a puffy white tunic.

He also had a scabbard attached to his belt. And when he saw Ben, he drew his sword upon him.

“W
ho are you?” the man asked in a thick Spanish accent. “FIEND, I'LL CUT YOU TO PIECES!”

“I'm not one of them,” Ben answered. “I'm not with Voris. I swear.” He stretched his arms wide, offering no defense against the sword. The man lowered it and began to tremble. Then he thrust the blade into the ground and fell to one knee, bowing before Ben.

“
Dios mio.
”

“What?”

“My Lord, I am Cisco del Puente, explorer and emissary of the king and queen of
España
. I was hired as mate aboard the
Santa Maria de Vincenze
. But Sir Edward Black, the British swine, captured our ship, and forced us to sail with him to this land. The ship ran aground. Many men drowned. Savages,
cowards
, shot arrows at us. I was the only one to make it to shore, and that is when I came upon this path. And I have followed this path ever since, oh, Lord.”

“Wait, hold up. . . .”

“I have followed it and endured the mysteries of this new land, knowing that our Holy Father sent me here to discover it for the glory
of Spain and the destruction of WHORE ENGLAND. And now I know for certain, as I gaze upon you, that I have found paradise. The path to God
.
I am here to serve you, my God in heaven.”

Cisco pressed his forehead hard into the hilt of his sword. The Smokes hovered above them both as the embers from the tent fire glowed red at the edge of the pit. Ben could see that his rock doll of Peter was all that remained. Everything else had been incinerated.

One of the Smokes flew over with a trowel and shovel, dropping them at Cisco's feet. Cisco was too busy praying to notice. Ben jerked him upward.

“We need to get to work,” he told the Spaniard.

“But Lord . . .”

“I'm not the Lord. And you are not in paradise.”

“Qué?”

“I'm not God.”

“You are not the Producer?”

“Nope. They told me I had to find him, too. I'm lost, man. Same as you.”

“Are you English?”

“I'm not English.”

“Good. The English . . . They are
pigs
.”

“Yeah, I think I got that from your little speech. Now get moving. The Smokes will kill us if we don't start working.”

“They are with the man with the fire eyes?”

“Yeah, they work for him.”

“This is not a good man.”

“No. No, he isn't.” He gave Cisco a shovel. “Don't say anything you aren't comfortable with those two shitbags hearing. They see it all and hear it all and they never sleep.”

Ben walked over to the landslide pile and started digging in,
carrying each shovelful up the ramp and dumping it far from the pit. Cisco followed suit.

“You said you came on a ship,” Ben said.

“Yes.”

“Was it the hovercraft?”

“Huntercraft?”

“What kind of ship was it?”

“One of the biggest and strongest Her Majesty had ever commissioned.”

Ben paused and turned to him. “What year do you think it is, Cisco?”

“The Year of Our Lord 1485.”

“Well, that's just fucking great,” Ben said, and he kept on shoveling.

“I have kept detailed maps of this land. And I have noted many places where gold can and will be found. When I bring those maps back to Spain, they will declare me the greatest explorer who ever lived.”

“Really.”

“I will name this land after my mother, Antonia.”

“Brother, I don't know how to explain this, but I'll give it a whirl: You are NOT in the New World.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because
I
come from the New World. Maryland. I assure you that Maryland does not behave the way this place behaves. I'm from the future and you're from the past and this place is a fucking wasteland. This place is nothing.”

“You are wrong. This is real. And Jesus has sent me here as his courier.” Cisco looked over at the massive red pickup truck at the western edge of the property. “What is that wagon?”

“That's the truck.”

“Is it yours?”

“If I play my cards right. Listen, man, you have a bag on you, right?”

“Yes.”

“Does it hold whatever you want it to hold?”

“Yes. It is like magic.”

“Did you get any bags of seeds?”

“No.”

“What about a crab? Did you meet a crab?”

“No.”

“What about a giant?”

“Yes. The woman giant. She threw me into a pit, and made me fight like a dog.”

“But you escaped.”

“To the house of the man with the fire eyes, yes.”

“Did you get a tent?”

“No. I sleep on the ground. But I did get this. . . .”

He reached into his little bag and pulled out a rolled-up mat.

“When I sleep on this mat, it is like sleeping on silk. And when I fall asleep, I have dreams of my mother. I am a little boy, at her side in the market. I can see her and touch her, and that is how I know this mat is a gift from the Lord. This whole land is a gift from the Lord.”

Ben snorted. “It's not a gift. You found a path that's cursed. And it's not real.”

Cisco blanched. “Who are you to say?”

“I just know. Cisco, you and are I are probably going to spend a lot of time together in this pit, so I'm not gonna overload you with information on our first day.”

They had stopped shoveling during their chat. The Smokes flew over and scowled at them angrily.

“We'd better get back to work,” Ben said.

And they did. Ben and the Spaniard labored day after day,
clearing the foundation, pouring and spreading the concrete slab, laying the stones, icing them with wet mortar, and building the exterior walls and battlements. Ben noticed that he was spending the majority of his working hours with his back to the Smokes. Sometimes they hovered close by, but usually they were content to linger in the background, their halogen eyes never flickering.

Every night, Ben and Cisco would sleep on Cisco's mat outside, spread out horizontally so that each man could rest his torso on the mat with his legs sticking out on the sand. The food and water provided by the Smokes grew more and more scarce. All the hard muscle Ben had built up from his early years of labor was beginning to deteriorate, leaving him with nothing but the permanent ache of every remaining joint, muscle, and nerve. His knee was falling apart, to the point where Cisco would put Ben's arm around him and carry him up the ramp at the end of every workday. At night, Ben would entertain Cisco by describing elaborate fantasies of killing the Smokes . . . shooting them, stabbing them, choking them, kicking them. Cisco had a bonus suggestion.

“The
strappado
, Mr. Ben.”

“What is that?”

“You tie the man's wrists behind his back. And then, you raise his arms up. . . .”

“You do that?”

“They did it to many members of the crew. Discipline. You can hear the shoulders popping out.”

“Jesus, man.”

“Do not speak of the Lord in such a manner.”

Cisco told Ben more stories of his life at sea, all as valuable to Ben as the good books he once had stocked in the tent library. From the explorer, he learned about sailing and maritime navigation, and all
the horrible things old sailors did to one another. Ben learned everything there was to know about Cisco. He learned about the small fishing village outside Cádiz where the Spaniard grew up, and he learned about Cisco's seven brothers, all of whom became sailors as well. Most of all, he learned that Cisco hated pretty much everyone who was not Spanish. Cisco hated the French. He hated the Portuguese. He hated the Italians. He
really
hated the English. (Ben made sure not to tell Cisco that he himself had English blood from his old man's side.) He even hated other Spaniards, like the Catalonians. Man, did he hate the Catalonians.

“The Catalonians . . . They are bird droppings that landed atop our fair kingdom. They are ooze. They are SHIT.”

“Cisco, I could listen to you rag on Catalonians all night.”

Cisco smiled, his gold tooth glinting in the starlight. “Good, because they are the mongrel afterbirth.”

They developed a code, so that they could make plans freely without the Smokes understanding them (or so they hoped). The “barrel” was Ben's pickle jar. The Smokes were “bricks.” Voris was “the slab.”

One day, with his body blocking the Smokes' view, Ben made a hole in the castle wall. He left a small compartment in the masonry and secreted a tiny water bottle inside it. Then he covered it with a loose stone. Every six days, at midday, Ben would unearth his little pickle jar from the hole in the sand and pour a bit of the poison into the water bottle, then put the jar back in the hole before the Smokes turned away from Voris. There was still one unknown ingredient in the poison left to go, and he would have to find it. He would have to experiment. He tried sand. He tried his own hair. He tried bits of his rotting work clothes. Nothing seemed to make it glow. The potion sample remained inert on every attempt.

“What's in the barrel today?” Cisco whispered to him once.

“Piece of my fingernail,” Ben said. “To crack the slab.”

“Did it?”

“No.”

Through their crude cipher, Ben explained the seed to Cisco, how it was still buried in the ground, along with the poison to kill Voris. Every twelve days, Ben would unearth the hard seed and smash it on the ground, only to see nothing come of it.

“Why would you care about something so worthless?” the explorer asked him.

“One day, it'll work. You'll see.”

Cisco shook his head. The explorer seemed to believe in everything fanciful
except
that dopey little seed.

“I will eat this seed of yours,” Cisco joked.

“That's not funny.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

“This scar, on your face. How do you get this scar?”

“I was in a sword fight and won.”

“This is a good and brave thing.”

“Oh, I'm brave as hell, Cisco.”

As the job progressed, Ben's memories became more blurred and abstract. He would speak to his rock at night, much to Cisco's confusion, and invent stories about the rock's day: what Peter wore, how his day at school was, what new friends he made, how the rest of the family was holding up. He would put the rock on his back and crawl around on all fours, giving it an elephant ride, as he did with the real Peter back at home, in his previous life. He would trace drawings of his family in the sand every night, the images growing morphed and distorted. His wife grew more beautiful. His children grew older and stronger, sometimes appearing superhuman to him. At night, the sand would
get kicked up by the wind and invade their little mat, coating Ben's skin in a layer of sediment he could never slough off. Little grains of it would get trapped behind his eyeballs, driving him wild with irritation.

Some days, the Smokes would deprive them of water entirely, and Ben's tongue would grow black and hard from extreme thirst working on the desert griddle. In his savage hunger, Ben saw mirages: great lakes filled with fruit punch, supermarket aisles lining the outskirts of the desert, a smoking pit with thick sausages hanging above a pile of burning hickory.

He and Cisco talked endlessly about food and cheese and wine. One night, they made a cannibalism pact: If one man died, the other could eat him. It was all right. Whatever it took for someone to get back on the path home. They discussed this pact openly, without using the code. It wasn't as if the Smokes would care.

“Remember,” Ben said, “I have to die.”

“Yes,” said Cisco.

“You can't start eating me before that happens.”

“But what if you're asleep and you
look
dead?” Cisco joked. “Let me have just an arm. You are right-handed, so I eat the left arm. This is the dumb arm.”

“Don't joke about that. Bad ideas always start off as bad jokes.”

“I suppose they do.”

Cisco looked up at the two moons in the sky.

“I cannot wait to go home,” Cisco said to Ben. “Someday, I will find my way back to Spain. And when the people find out I have discovered this New Orient . . .”

“I keep telling you: It's not real.”

“How do you know this? You insist and you insist some more that
this is not real when you are here. I do not think your outlook is healthy in this way.”

“I didn't mean that's it not real. It's just . . . In my time, five hundred years after you live, the whole of the Earth is mapped. Everything's been discovered.”

“That is not possible.”

“I'm telling you, Cisco: Where I come from, there are cameras in outer space that can look down and see everything. At home, I have a little box that can see whatever those cameras see. I can bring up any section of the world I like and get a perfect rendering of it, and I can hear a voice that tells me how to get wherever I need to go.”

“This is a gift from God.”

“You would think. And yet.”

“If this little box of yours can show you everything, why did your little box never show you this place?”

“I don't know.”

“And did you know about this second moon before?”

“No.”

“Well then, I have discovered it. A new moon on the far side of the world. They'll name this new moon after me. And the continent after my mother.”

“They already named the New World continent.”

“And what did they name it?”

“America.”

“After Vespucci? THE FILTHY
ITALIANO
PIGDOG?!”

“Relax, relax. If I get back, I'll tell everyone America is the wrong name for it.”

“You don't believe you'll ever get back.”