Robert Wilson - The Chronoliths

“He’s safer in the car. You said so yourself.”

She was whispering now.

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“Jeff Jr. didn’t talk about the… pilgrimage, but when he asked for the car I guess I should have suspected. His father said we ought not to tell the police. It would only make Jeff a criminal. Or us, for abetting him. He’ll be back, though. I know he will.”

“You could help us—” Hitch began.

“You see how upside-down everything is? Can you blame the children?”

“Give us your license and the car’s GPS signature. We won’t bring the police into it.”

She reached absently for her purse, then hesitated. “If you do find them, will you be nice to Jeff?”

We promised we would.

Hitch talked to Morris Torrance, who traced the car to El Paso. The GPS package was sitting in a local recycler’s yard; the rest of the car was missing, probably sold or bartered for safe passage across the border. “They’re bound for Portillo,” Hitch said, “almost certainly.”

“So we go there,” I said.

He nodded. “Morris is arranging the flight. We need to leave as soon as possible.”

I thought about that. “It’s not just a rumor, is it? Portillo, I mean. The Chronolith.”

“No,” he said flatly. “It’s not just a rumor. We need to be there soon.”

At the exit into Portillo we were turned away by soldiers who told us the town was already uninhabitable, full of Americans squatting like dogs on the street, a disgrace. As if to confirm this, they waved through a convoy of Red Cross relief trucks while we waited.

Hitch didn’t argue with the soldiers but drove a couple of miles farther south along the cracked and pot-holed highway. He said there was another way into Portillo, not much more than a goat track but passable enough in the battered van we had rented at the airport. “The back roads are safer anyway,” he said. “Long as we don’t stop.” Hitch had always preferred back roads.

“Why here ?” Ashlee wondered, looking out the window into a blank Sonoran landscape, agaves and yellow scrub grass and the occasional struggling cattle ranch.

The Kuin recession had been hard on Mexico, rolling back the gains of the Gonsalvez administration and restoring the venerable and corrupt Partido Revolucionario Institucional to power. Rural poverty had reached pre-millennial levels. Mexico City was simultaneously the most densely populated city on the continent and the most polluted and crime-ridden. Portillo, contrarily, was a minor town without any known strategic or military significance, one more dusty village drained of prosperity and left to die.

“There are more Chronoliths outside urban centers than in them,” I told Ashlee. “Touchdown points seem almost random, excepting the large-scale markers like Bangkok or Jerusalem. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s easier to build a Chronolith out where there’s some free space. Or maybe the smaller monuments are erected before the cities fall to the Kuinists.”

We had a cooler full of bottled water and a couple of boxes of camp food. More than enough to last us. Sue Chopra, back in Baltimore, was still correlating data from her unofficial network of informants and from the latest generation of surveillance satellites. The news about Portillo hadn’t been made public. Officials feared it would only attract more pilgrims. But Internet rumors had done that quite efficiently despite the official veil of silence.

We had food and water for five days at least, which was more than enough because, according to Sue’s best estimate, we were less than fifty hours away from touchdown.

The “goat track” was a rut through rocky chaparral, crowned by the endless turquoise sky. We were still a dozen miles outside of town when we saw the first corpse.

Ashlee insisted on stopping, though it was obvious there was nothing we could do. She wanted to be sure. The body, she said, was about Adam’s size.

But this young man dressed in a dirty white hemp shirt and yellow Kevlar pants had been dead quite a while. His shoes had been stolen, plus his watch and terminal, and surely his wallet, though we didn’t check. His skull had been fractured by some blunt instrument. The body was swollen with decomposition and had evidently attracted a number of predators, though only the ants were currently visible, commuting lazily up his sun-dried right arm.

“Most likely we’ll see more of this kind of thing,” Hitch said, looking from the corpse to the horizon. “There are more thieves than flies in this part of the country, at least since the PRI canceled the last election. A couple thousand obviously gullible Americans in one place is a magnet for every homicidal asshole south of Juarez, and they’re way too hungry to be scrupulous.”

I suppose he could have said this more gently, but what would be the point? The evidence lay on the sandy margin of the road, stinking.

I looked at Ashlee. Ashlee regarded the dead young American. Her face was pale, and her eyes glittered with dismay.

Ashlee had argued that she ought to come with us, and in the end I had agreed. I might be able to rescue Kaitlin from this debacle, but I had no leverage with Adam Mills. Even if I could find him, Ashlee said, I wouldn’t be able to argue him out of the haj. Maybe no one could, including herself, but she needed to try.

Of course it was dangerous, brutally dangerous, but Ashlee was determined enough to attempt the trip with or without us. And I understood the way she felt. Sometimes the conscience makes demands that are non-negotiable. Courage has nothing to do with it. We weren’t here because we were brave. We were here because we had to be here.

But the dead American was a demonstration of every truth we would have preferred to evade. The truth that our children had come to a place where things like this happened. That it might as easily have been Adam or Kaitlin discarded by the side of the road. That not every child in jeopardy can be saved.

Hitch climbed behind the wheel of the van. I sat in the back with Ash. She put her head against my shoulder, showing fatigue for the first time since we’d left the United States.

There was more evidence that we weren’t the only Americans to have taken this route into Portillo. We passed a sedan that had ridden up an embankment and broken an axle and been abandoned in place. A rust-eaten Edison with Oregon plates scooted recklessly around us, billowing clouds of alkaline dust into the afternoon air. And then, at last, we topped a rise, and the village of Portillo lay before us, dome tents clustered on the access roads like insect eggs. The main road through Portillo was lined with adobe garages, trash heaps generated by the haj, poverty housing, and a nearly impassable maze of American cars. The town itself, at least from this distance, was a smudge of colonial architecture bookended by a couple of franchise motels and service stations. All of it belonged now, by default, to the Kuinists. Haj youth of all kinds had gathered here, most with inadequate supplies and survival skills. The town’s permanent residents had largely abandoned their homes and left for the city, Hitch said; those who remained were the infirm or the elderly, thieves or water-sellers, opportunists or overwhelmed members of the local constabulary. There was very little food outside of the supply tents set up by international relief agencies. The army blockade was turning away vendors, hoping hunger would disperse the pilgrimage.

Ashlee gazed at this dust-bleached Mecca with obvious despair. “Even if they’re here,” she said, “how do we find them?”

“You let me do some leg work,” Hitch said, “that’s how. But first we have to get a little closer.”