Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (34 page)

Even when the trees gave way to low shrubs and bushes, the flames paced them, protecting them from being seen. It was as if once Wayra had imagined the wall of flames, Esperanza had drawn upon its own power to create and maintain them. She wondered if the mango trees were still intact, real.

Now that nothing lay between them and the curved dome of twilight on their left, she thought she could see shadows and silhouettes on the other side of the twilight, as though it were a kind of translucent screen. Wayra apparently noticed this, too, and moved toward it. Tess followed him closely. Even Kali swept in for a look, and landed on Wayra’s shoulder.

They stopped about three feet from the wall of twilight. It shimmered and danced, as if covered with sequins. She noticed how the light vanished into the ground and swept upward as far as she could see. The shadows on the other side were definitely shapes—rectangular, square, circular, and then shapes like swaying trees, maybe pines.

“Those shapes appear to be from outside, Wayra. Is the whiteness becoming transparent?”

“I think the city is trying to break free of whatever the chasers did. When you’re outside of El Bosque, it looks like the entire area has been erased. When I first got in here, it was twilight like it is now but the twilight didn’t shimmer and you couldn’t see anything on the other side of it.”

“How can we bolster whatever the city is doing? I held a vision of a mango tree, you held an image of a wall of fire. Both materialized. Maybe we should try holding an image of the neighborhood as it once was.”

Wayra thought about it, but not for long. “Can you remember what it was like before, Tess?”

“No. But I can sure as hell hold an image of a blue sky or a sky strewn with stars.”

Kali suddenly squawked and flew upward. Then the wall of fire winked out like a match, and when Tess glanced back, she saw they were on the west side of a street filled with houses and apartment buildings. A small group of men and women moved toward them, armed with baseball bats, shovels, pool sticks, stones, and behind them was a much larger crowd carrying torches and weapons. The man leading the small group yelled, “There they are!”

“Shit, Wayra.”

But Wayra was already walking toward them, patting the air with his hands, calling, “Javier. I spoke to you earlier at the church.”

Tess stood rooted to the ground, her heart somersaulting in her chest. She desperately wished she had an army on horseback at her disposal, an army of mythological Olympians who would gallop into the road from the north and the south, the east and the west, and surround these mobs.

“I remember you,” Javier shouted, raising his hand, signaling the group behind him to stop. “From the church. From the funeral. You and the woman don’t belong here. You’re invaders, you mean us harm, you—”

“This twilight is your enemy.” Wayra threw his arms out at his sides. “It has robbed your memories, made you violent and aggressive, messed up your—”

“Liar,” Javier shrieked. “Get them, take them!”

As the two groups rushed toward them, hurling rocks, swinging their shovels and bats and pitchforks, an army of giants on horseback poured into the road from every side, the deafening thunder of the horses’ hooves magnified by the dome of twilight that still gripped El Bosque. The giants swung long, thick clubs covered in spikes, wore chest armor and metal helmets that gave them a distinctive alien look. Some sort of white substance flew up around them—like snow or powder or pale beach sand—and it thickened and blew around as more and more of these giants on horseback appeared.

That’s how I imagined them, Tess thought, then both groups of hostiles tore away from the road, Wayra leaped back, Tess grabbed his hand, and they raced for the nearest building, a humble one-story house sealed up like a tomb. They ran along the right side, following Kali as she swept toward a small greenhouse out back. Padlocked, the doors were padlocked.

“Shit, Wayra…”

“This way.”

They tore around to the back of the structure, Wayra dropped to the ground, rolled back on his ass, and slammed his feet against the opaque glass.

He broke open a hole close to the ground, wrapped his jacket around Kali. The parrot squawked and tried to bite him as she struggled to free herself. Wayra shoved his jacket through the opening, Tess pushed her pack through, and dropped onto her stomach. She propelled herself forward with the balls of her feet and grabbed on to whatever she could in front of her, pulling herself through the opening, her chin scraping against the ground.

Once she was inside the greenhouse, she quickly freed Kali from Wayra’s jacket and the parrot flew high into the greenhouse, squawking, irate. Tess gripped Wayra’s forearms and pulled him through the opening. He shot to his feet. “Hurry, we’ve got to hurry, they’re really close.” He pushed a potted tree in front of the broken glass and they raced after Kali, through a corridor lined by citrus trees.

“That army,” Wayra said softly. “Did you … imagine them?”

“More like wishful thinking.”

“Nice job.”

“It didn’t get us far.”

“It bought us time, Tess. Mango trees, fire, an army of giants. Now we need to visualize and create something—”

The sound of breaking glass interrupted Wayra and he and Tess quickly ducked into the citrus trees.
Stay here,
he mouthed, and dropped to his hands and knees. Bones and muscles and tendons in his hands and face began to ripple beneath his skin, his arms and hands turned into legs and paws, his legs shortened, his clothing vanished, fur sprang from the pores in his skin. His face and head elongated, his human eyes and mouth and ears transformed into those of a dog. He grew a tail. Tess wondered if he would be fully human when he shifted again, or if his left paw would become even more pronounced. Or if he would even be able to shift into his human form again.

And then he took off into the greenhouse and Tess just stood there in the citrus trees, in the grips of a complete memory of the first time she had seen Wayra shape-shift.

It had happened when she was a transitional soul, in a tunnel beneath a greenhouse similar to this one, where she and Wayra, in his dog form, had been hiding during a
brujo
attack. At the time, she hadn’t known he was a shape shifter, she’d thought he was just a smart dog named Nomad. He had left her at one point and she had gone looking for him and seen a man in the greenhouse arguing with someone. That man had been Wayra. With this memory came fragments of another, of herself and a man she knew was Ian pursued by
brujos
as they fled into the countryside around Esperanza. They were transitional souls then and suddenly knew the only way they could be together was to find their way back to Esperanza in their physical bodies.

They stole my memories, these bastards stole my memories.

Which bastards? Chasers?
Brujos?
Both?

A mark on the underside of her wrist now itched and burned like crazy and Tess dropped into a crouch and dug her fingers into moist soil and rubbed it over the mark, soothing it. Wayra had told her about the mark on her wrist, how it burned when
brujos
were nearby. She picked up several large stones, pulled her slingshot from her bag, and slipped away from the protection of the trees. She moved quickly and silently toward the sound of voices, a man and woman arguing.

Then she saw them, a black man and a diminutive Ecuadorian woman, huddling close together, near the window they had broken to get into the greenhouse. The woman was nearly hysterical, frantically stabbing her finger at Wayra, still in his dog form.
“I hate dogs, get that dog away from me. Look, it’s baring its teeth, it’s going to attack us. Hit it, Ricardo, hit it with your stick!”

“It’s not a goddamn dog, it’s Wayra, a shifter, a shape shifter, Naomi, can’t you remember anything? Show yourself, Wayra.”

Naomi grabbed the stick from his hand, and just as she swung it into the air, Tess shot the largest stone. It struck Naomi in the cheek and she dropped the stick and stumbled back, shrieking in pain, her hands flying to her face, blood streaming through her fingers. Ricardo spun around, saw Tess, and shouted,
“We’re trapped in these forms, we can’t hurt you.”

“Get away from Wayra or this next stone is going to pierce your fucking eye,” Tess snapped, moving toward him, the slingshot armed, ready.

Wayra shifted into his human form, fur now extending past the elbow of his left arm, and leaped between her and Ricardo, waving his arms. “Back off, Tess, back off. They don’t mean us any harm. Ricardo and I have a truce.”

“You made a truce with a
brujo
?” Tess burst out. “I thought you told me—”

“You made a truce with
him
?” Naomi screamed. “With the shifter who turned me and my son?” She pressed her fists to her mouth. “I remember,” she said softly.

Bits and pieces of Tess’s disconnected memories abruptly slammed together. Even though she now understood who Ricardo and Naomi were, she couldn’t fathom a truce. “
Brujos
lie, Wayra.”

Ricardo finally hurried over to Naomi, now sitting on the ground, weeping. He slipped his arm around her, spoke softly to her, pulled a hanky from his pocket and pressed it against the gash on her cheek. His obvious affection for her, his solicitousness, shocked Tess. She tossed her stone into the trees, slipped the slingshot in her back pocket, and joined Wayra, who now was peering out the broken window.

Torchlights flickered in the distance. “Nearly every greenhouse has access to the tunnels,” Wayra said. “We need to find the tunnel under this one.” He whistled shrilly for Kali, who swept in over their heads. “Find the tunnel, find the opening.”

“I’m not following
you
into any tunnel,” spat Naomi.

“It’s a way out,” Wayra shot back. “But suit yourself.”

“We’re going,” Ricardo told her, taking Naomi by the arm.

“So we get out and then what?” Naomi asked. “The dead and the living and shifters all live happily ever after?”

“Of course not,” Wayra said.

“I’m not asking you, Wayra,” Naomi said irritably.

Wayra stabbed his thumb toward Ricardo. “He said he would fight for his tribe’s right to occupy Esperanza alongside the living.”

Naomi glanced at Ricardo. “You actually said that?”

“Yeah. Meant it, too.”

The mob was nearly on them, their shouts so loud that Tess could distinguish individual words.
Get them, kill them.
She spun around and loped after Kali, now flying fast and low between the lines of citrus trees.

2.

When Lauren came to, it took her a moment to orient herself, to remember that she was in
Further,
in the old bus that had belonged to the Merry Pranksters. A whiteness surrounded the bus and it was as thick as clam chowder.

Fog? Was it
brujo
fog? She didn’t hear the
brujo
litany, but she couldn’t dismiss the possibility that it was
brujo
fog. Worse than the whiteness was the stillness, the utter lack of noise. She couldn’t hear anything, not even the sound of her own breathing.

Lauren glanced over at Ken Kesey, slumped against the steering wheel, arms resting on top of it, forehead pressed into the crook of his elbow. Alarmed, she looked back and saw that Garcia was flung back against his seat, mouth open, his guitar resting across his thighs, and that McKenna lay on his side on the floor, curled up like an infant. Ian was folded like a rag doll over the back of Garcia’s seat. And the dozens of people who had been with them were now gone.

“Shit, shit, what’s going on?” She shot to her feet and shook Kesey. “Ken, c’mon, wake up. You’re freaking me out.”

He didn’t wake up. She pulled the upper part of his body away from the steering wheel, pushed him back against the seat, raised his eyelids. His pupils weren’t dilated, he was breathing, his color was good, his pulse was strong. Alive, but unconscious. Except that he wasn’t alive, he had died on November 1, 2001, she had read about it in the
Miami Herald.

Lauren hurried over to Garcia, carefully removed his guitar from his thighs and set it upright against the side of the bus, and checked him over just as she had Kesey. Same thing. Alive but unconscious. She knelt on the floor next to McKenna, rolled him onto his back. Eyes, breathing, pulse, color. Alive but unconscious.

Terrified now that everything she’d experienced since ingesting Segunda Vista was nothing but hallucination, that she was actually still sitting in the hotel room with Leo and Pedro and Ian, Lauren moved quickly to Ian. If she touched him, would her hands slip through him? “Ian,” she said loudly. “Wake up.”

He didn’t stir.

Lauren slipped her arms around Ian’s waist, relieved that he was real, that her arms didn’t pass through him, and pulled him back against the seat. His head flopped to one side. Beneath his lids, his eyes moved rapidly. REM sleep. Ian was dreaming. Was she dreaming, too? Was her dream lucid? Lauren pinched her forearm so hard the skin briefly turned a bright red. Not a dream. Then again, when Tess and Ian had had their near death experiences that had brought them to Esperanza as transitional souls, everything for them, Tess had told her, had seemed undeniably real.

She checked Ian. His pulse was fast, but he otherwise appeared to be okay. She shook him by the shoulders, and when he didn’t respond, she slapped him hard across the face and screamed, “Ian, wake up!”

He suddenly bolted upright, eyes wide open, and grabbed her wrist.

“What the fuck,” he sputtered, and released her wrist and looked around slowly, like a man coming out of a dream. “This looks like …
brujo
fog.”

“I don’t think it is. It doesn’t drift through the open windows. I … don’t hear the litany. Whatever it is, it doesn’t move. I can’t rouse the others. Their vitals are fine, but they’re unconscious.”

Ian held her gaze for a moment and she sensed he was about to say the obvious, that dead people didn’t have vital signs. “What happened to everyone else?”