Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (33 page)

Then Ian stepped into the bus and was shocked by its spaciousness. It was the interior of a large commercial bus, with seats along either side painted in luminous reds and yellows and blues that sported large, hand-painted silver peace signs. A dozen vertical poles marched down the middle, so that when the seats were taken, the overflow of passengers could be accommodated.

“Ian,” Lauren called.

He spotted her at the front of the bus and moved through the crush of other passengers until he reached the seat she’d saved for him, right behind the passenger seat.

“We need to stick together, Ian.”

“Was
Further
actually this big?”

“Nope,” she said, then swung around in her seat, lifted her legs, and pressed her shoes against the dashboard like a little kid who had just been told that Santa Claus was right outside the front window.

Garcia was the last on board, the door whispered shut, Kesey dropped into the driver’s seat, and picked up a mike. “Amigos, we have choices to make.” His voice boomed through the bus. “Up ahead, we’ve got
brujo
fog that hopes to swallow us.” He revved the engine. “Inside the whiteness, you have loved ones who need to be taken out.” Another rev of the engine. “Around us, we have chaser council members who are disappearing bits and pieces of Esperanza. And then we have the city herself. She’s starting to fight back. Otherwise, how could the three of us and our bus even be here?” Kesey laughed. “So what’s it going to be, folks? Who wants to be let off? Raise your hands.”

Not a single hand went up.

“All right, it’s unanimous, then. We’re headed for the fog filled with fucker
brujos
and then into the whiteness.”

“Adentro, adentro, adentro,”
everyone chanted. Inside, inside, inside.

Kesey revved the engine once again, then released the hand brake and
Further
leaped forward like a young stallion, charging toward the
brujo
fog, speeding toward what was unknown and hidden. And then the bus tore into the fog.

For seconds, the
brujo
litany echoed in the fog, its collective voice rising and falling and rising again, a kind of national anthem, the one thing to which they clung above all else, that which united them. Then the hungry ghosts hammered the old bus like gigantic hail pellets on a roof. The light outside the windows turned soft, strange, muted, like descending twilight. Moments later,
Further
appeared to be airborne, soaring like a 777 through the upper stratosphere.

Despite the effects of Segunda Vista, Ian knew what he was seeing and where the bus was headed and why. He had an approximate time and date for his experience. But as a journalist, he struggled with the rest of it, all the finer details, like how he could be in a bus that had died with its owners, who were nonetheless alive, well, and apparently flourishing.

He concluded that he just didn’t have the answers and probably never would.

They emerged on the other side of the
brujo
fog, the bus slammed over the cobblestones, gathering speed. It headed toward the barricade of orange cones and yellow crime tape and cops on foot, on horseback, in their cars, and Kesey aimed it at the glittering whiteness.

Ian knew the bus was visible to others. Pedestrians outside gawked, pointed, shouted. The police horses reared up, throwing off their riders, and galloped up the sidewalk. The cops on foot opened fire on the bus and bullets pinged off its sides, cracked the windshield, and probably flattened all the tires.

But the bus didn’t stop, didn’t slow down, and the cops took off, racing for safety. Now the police vehicles peeled away from the barricade so fast that two of them crashed into a third car and then
Further
was beyond them, beyond all of them, beyond everything, and plunged into the whiteness.

Everything went still, soundless.

Sixteen

The Hostiles

1.

Tess and Wayra took refuge in an empty school on the western edge of El Bosque. They had gotten in through an unlocked side door and were now crouched at either side of a dirty window, searching the eerie, twilit street for movement, for the source of the shouts they’d been hearing for the last thirty minutes.

“See anything yet?” he whispered.

“Nothing. But I smell smoke. Why would these people be burning their own neighborhood? What’s
wrong
with them?”

“Like you, they can’t remember anything. They can’t remember who they are, what they’re doing here, why they’re here. I think they see strangers as a threat, as invaders.”

Tess glanced around at the parrot, perched on the back of a chair, barely visible in the twilight that penetrated the window. She could hear Kali’s soft trilling, a sound she apparently made when she preened. Now and then, Tess felt the stirring of memories about the parrot and about Wayra, but so far, no specific memories had surfaced. She felt incomplete, like half a person. The contact list on her iPhone and iPad remained mostly a mystery.

“Is Kali your pet?” Tess asked.

“Nope.” Wayra sounded amused. “For years, she occupied a window perch at the inn where you and Ian stayed when you first arrived as transitionals. Back then, I thought she was a spirit. For a while, I entertained the possibility that she was a shifter. But she seems to be one of those magical birds, like an owl or quetzal, that traverses dimensions. It’s why she could get into El Bosque when none of the rest of us could.”

Wayra had told her how they’d met when she and Ian were transitional souls who didn’t realize they were in comas in their respective states, separated by forty years in time. At first, she and Ian had known Wayra as a dog, his shifter form. Tess had seen his left paw, so she didn’t laugh. In fact, this explanation
felt
right, which she took to be a positive sign. Even if she couldn’t consciously remember squat, her intuition seemed to be remembering some things for her.

Wayra had filled her in on
brujos
and chasers and told her how, after the battle that had annihilated Dominica’s tribe more than four years ago, Dominica had seized Tess’s niece, Maddie, and fled Ecuador. He told her about the
Expat News,
the newspaper she and Ian had started. He had told her enough so that if her memories began to surface, she would be able to connect some of the dots. But every time she looked within, struggling to find something—anything—about her past, it was like tuning into a band of white noise on a radio.

“I need to find something to eat,” Tess whispered. “Maybe there’s food in the school cafeteria.”

“I’m starving, too. I’ll go with you.”

Wayra whistled softly for Kali and the parrot flew over to him and touched down on his shoulder, her wings fluttering. He turned on a flashlight and they moved through the classroom and out into the hall, past rows of lockers, open doors to other classrooms, and into the cafeteria at the back of the school.

The large cafeteria had a wall of windows on the left that revealed the perpetual twilight. It made her deeply uneasy. Anyone could peer in through those windows and see her, Wayra, and the parrot. Too exposed here, she thought.

They threaded their way between dozens of rectangular and circular tables, toward the back of the cafeteria. Here was the self-serve area, where dishes, bowls, and glasses were stacked ever so neatly to one side of the empty aluminum bins. To the far right of the serving area, the door to the kitchen stood open. Tess headed straight toward it, Kali flying along ahead of her, Wayra behind her.

The kitchen, long and narrow and meticulously tidy, was lined with pots and pans that hung within easy reach from hooks along the ceiling. Stacked neatly in the cabinets were plates and bowls. At the very end of the kitchen stood a fire exit door. In between were stoves, microwaves, and an industrial-sized fridge. Tess opened it and was relieved to discover that the electricity was still on and that the fridge was crammed with food.

She pulled out a six-pack of bottled water, a loaf of rye bread, a package of Swiss cheese, wilted lettuce, a couple of tomatoes, mustard, part of a turkey, and apples. As she proceeded to make sandwiches, Wayra located paper plates, sliced up the apples, and scooped some slices onto a plate for Kali. The parrot waddled across the counter to the plate, picked up a slice with her beak, then held it between her claws and happily nibbled away as Tess made four sandwiches.

She and Wayra wolfed down the food while standing at the counter, two sandwiches apiece. But even when she finished the last of hers, she was still hungry, so she helped herself to several slices of turkey and gobbled them down, too. Wayra said, “I’ve never seen you eat so much at one time.”

“Really? How do I normally eat?”

“Usually, you’re picky. You sort of graze throughout the day.” He suddenly rocked forward and
sniffed
at her.

Tess leaned back, away from him. “Jesus, Wayra.”

“You’re pregnant,” he blurted.

“That’s crazy. I can’t be pregnant.”

“My sense of smell is rarely wrong, Tess.”

“Well, it’s wrong
this
time.”

But as soon as she said it, a memory exploded into her consciousness, of herself using an early-pregnancy test, setting the test strip aside. But she couldn’t recall anything beyond that—such as the results. Or where she’d been when she’d done the test.

Kali suddenly emitted a shriek and soared around the kitchen, squawking,
“Ya vienen, ya vienen.”

They’re coming.

Within seconds, glass shattered somewhere nearby, shouts rang out, and the pounding of feet thundered through the air, as though wild horses were loose outside. “Shit,” Wayra hissed. “Out the fire exit.”

Tess grabbed a couple bottles of water and ran after Wayra, to the back of the kitchen. As they slammed through the fire exit, the alarm went off, a steady, deafening shriek that announced,
We’re here, hey, we’re here …

They raced after Kali and plunged into a wooded area behind the school. But it turned out to be just a narrow band of trees that grew parallel to the western edge of the disappeared area. Nowhere to run. Wayra stabbed his thumb at Kali, who circled the upper part of a monkey puzzle tree, then vanished into the leaves.

“Can you climb a tree?” he asked.

“Of course I can.” She tore off her sneakers, shoved them in her pack, and shrugged the pack onto her back. Then she climbed the tree fast, like a crab, hands here, feet there, up and up and up. It shocked her that she had meant what she said, that she knew how to climb a tree.
But it used to be mango trees
. This thought triggered a cascade of memories of a tremendous mango tree that had grown in her backyard when she was a kid in Miami.

Like a ceiba tree she had seen somewhere, that childhood mango tree had had more branches than Shiva had arms, most of them thick and sturdy enough to hold an eight-year-old kid. She had climbed to the very top of the tree, where the plumpest, ripest mangoes hung, and plucked one. She had peeled it while sunlight streamed over her, and drank in its color and texture, a rich reddish gold, smooth and thick. Then she’d bitten into it and that sweet warmth had rushed into her mouth, squished between her teeth, slipped down her throat, and dribbled out the corners of her mouth and down onto her chin. She had felt deliriously happy.

And now, as she clung to a
Y
juncture high in the branches, the monkey puzzle tree she had climbed
physically transformed
into that mango tree from her childhood. The branches thickened beneath her hands, the leaves proliferated until the tree was as full and green as the one in her memory. Plump, ripe mangoes hung from the branches.

She didn’t know what version of the tree Wayra perceived as he climbed, but he appeared to be climbing the same tree that she saw. As he got closer to her, he said, “Mango trees don’t grow in this region, not outside of greenhouses. But this is a mango tree. And now every other tree here is a mango tree, too.”

“This tree is in my head, Wayra. A vivid memory that has taken on … a physical reality.”

Even in the muted twilight among the thick leaves, she could see his eyes widening with sudden comprehension. “The city is our
ally,
Tess. I think Esperanza is evening up the odds. What we imagine is manifesting
fast
. Imagine a fire.”

“Fire?”

“A wall of flames between us and the school.”

He shimmied out on a thick branch next to hers, shut his eyes. Tess gripped the branches more tightly, pressed her forehead to the bark, tried to imagine a wall of flames. The fire alarm kept shrieking, the stink of smoke grew stronger, and down below she now saw moving torches, flashlights, the mob pouring through the fire exit door. Fear pumped through her hard and fast, fear that the mob would spot them, that they would set the tree on fire, that she and Wayra would die in this horrible place. She couldn’t move past her fear to visualize anything.

The mob was closing in, she dug her fingernails into the bark.
Fire, fire, fire, a dancing wall of flames.

Suddenly, a wall of fire sprang up between the building and the trees where she and Wayra were hidden. Tongues of flames leaped twenty, thirty, forty feet in the air, and licked at the twilight, yet didn’t touch the trees. The flames actually leaned outward away from the trees, toward the building, as if blown that way by wind. But there wasn’t any wind, the air didn’t stir at all, and Tess realized the wall of flames was Wayra’s creation and he was pushing it out away from them.

He shimmied toward her and pointed down. “The flames will hold long enough to screen us.”

“How do you know that?”

“I feel it.” He gestured toward Kali, now circling high above the trees and the flames. “She’ll scope things out.”

As they scrambled down from the tree, the wall of fire remained intact, the flames leaping, crackling, emitting a tremendous heat that she felt against her face and arms. Shouts and screams from the mob pierced the air. She and Wayra dashed northward through the high weeds, across ground so dry it was as hard as concrete. The barrier of flames moved swiftly parallel to them, keeping them hidden.