The Chronoliths

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

Fifteen

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-mille

“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.”

We drove across rocky soil to a stretch of cracked tarmac. The stench of the haj came through the windows with the subtlety of a clenched fist, and Ashlee lit a cigarette, mostly to cover the smell.

Hitch parked us behind a fire-blackened adobe shack roughly half a mile out of town. The van was hidden from the main road by a stand of dry jacarandas and stacks of excrement-encrusted chicken coops.

Hitch had bought weapons after we crossed the border and he insisted on showing Ashlee and me how to use them. Not that we resisted. I had never discharged a weapon in my life — I had grown up in a gun-shy decade and had learned a civilized loathing of handguns — but Hitch left me a pistol with a full clip and made sure I knew how to disengage the safety mechanism and hold the weapon so that I wouldn’t break my wrist if I fired it.

The idea was that Ashlee and I would stay with the van, guarding our food, water, and transportation, while Hitch went into Portillo to locate Adam’s haj group and broker a meeting. Ashlee wanted to head directly into town — and I understood the need — but Hitch was adamant. The van was our major asset and needed protection; we would be useless to Kaitlin or Adam without the vehicle.

Hitch took a weapon of his own and walked toward town. I watched him vanish into the dusk. Then I locked the van’s doors and joined Ashlee in the front seat, where she had fixed us a meal of trail bars and apples and tepid instant coffee from a thermos. We ate silently while the light drained from the sky. Stars came out, bright and sharp even through the smoke haze and the dusty windshield.