Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (38 page)

Charlie heard someone shouting his name and looked around. A car had pulled up at the curb and Leo and Pedro, Maddie and Sanchez piled out and hurried toward them. Illary circled above them, watchful, silent, keeping her distance, then flew off. “Here come my exceptions,” Charlie said, and Maddie barreled into his open arms. How real and solid she felt, he thought. How warm and alive.

“A chaser dude named Victor told me to come here,” Maddie said, her voice soft, almost breathless. “Something about the ghost train. Is it true? Can the ghost train take us into El Bosque?”

“We think so,” Newton replied.

“
Think
so?” Sanchez shook his head. “That’s not good enough.”

“It’s a theory,” Newton said. “No one has ever tried this before.”

“I tried to get into El Bosque,” said Maddie. “I’d gotten a text message from Ian after he and Lauren had taken Segunda Vista. They figured it might enable them to find a way into the disappeared area. Anyway, I couldn’t get in.”

“The mandatory evacuation orders cover everything within five miles of El Bosque,” Leo explained. “The science guys have apparently measured vast electromagnetic fluctuations in the area, just like what happened around the Café Taquina and El Bosque before the erasures happened. Or so they said when they picked up Pedro and me. Fortunately, Diego made them drop us at Wayra and Illary’s place.” Leo’s eyes met Charlie’s. “That was clever, Charlie, what you and Karina did, making the room so cold that you could write a message in the frost.”

“Clever but risky,” Pedro added. “The cops could’ve seen the message. Luckily for us, the message had faded by the time they broke open the door to our hotel room.”

“We didn’t have a choice,” Charlie said. “We couldn’t create virtual forms until we got back into downtown Esperanza. All the rules have been turned inside out. Have you heard from Lore, Leo?”

“No. But she’s in there, I’m sure of it. With Ian and probably with Wayra, too.” Leo jammed his hands in his jacket pockets. “Nothing good is happening there, Newton, so can we get this train here and moving?”

“Hey, Doc, it’s not up to me,” Newton said.

“So how do we board a ghost train?” Sanchez asked.

“We’ll ask the conductor,” Newton said. “I’m not sure.” He gestured at their packs, and bags. “It’d be better if you left your stuff here. It may slow you down. I’m not sure how this works.”

“Oh, great,” Charlie said. “And here I thought you knew what you were doing.”

“My medical bag stays with me.” Leo’s fingers tightened over the strap of the bag that hung from his right shoulder. “Right here.”

“My stuff stays with me,” Maddie said, and fitted the strap of her large black canvas bag over her head and arranged it so it fell along the right side of her body. “And, oh, Jessie’s joining us.” She slipped two fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly, sharply.

Shit, no, Charlie thought. But what he thought at that moment about the dog or the ghost train or any of it didn’t matter. Maddie’s whistle brought the golden retriever racing around the corner of the depot, onto the platform, and Sanchez snapped on her leash and told her to sit and she did. He slipped her a treat.

“I don’t know if the conductor will allow dogs,” Newton said, eyeing the dog with obvious distaste.

Jessie tugged on her leash and moved closer to Newton, sniffing at his shoes, his jeans, then she sat down right in front of him, barked, and held up her paw.

“What the hell does
that
mean?” Newton asked.

Sanchez rolled his eyes. “It means she’d like to shake your hand.”

“I don’t do paws,” Newton said.

“For Chrissake, Newton,” Charlie muttered. “She’s a dog.” He leaned over and shook Jessie’s paw. “See? She isn’t going to drool on you or bite you or piss on your shoes.”

Newton stepped back, refusing to touch Jessie. “Like I said, we’ll have trouble with the conductor letting her aboard.”

“He will,” Sanchez said.

“You can see that psychically?” Newton asked.

“No.” Sanchez ran his hand over the dog’s back. “Now and then, Jessie lets me in her head. And she’s assuring me she can charm anyone, even a ghost conductor.”

A gust of wind suddenly whipped through the trees on either side of the depot. It blew Maddie’s red hair across her face, tossed Karina’s braid over her shoulder, stole a hat from one of the hipsters across the street, and toppled a trash can.

“That was strange,” Karina said. “Where’d that weird gust come from?”

“Holy crap,” Leo said. “What is
that
?”

He pointed west, at what looked like a huge swarm of insects or maybe a massive flock of birds in the distance, in the direction of El Bosque. Charlie saw that the formation stretched for miles to the north and south, and then began to turn in on itself, whirling faster and faster until it became a tremendous tornado.

“Locusts?
” Victor scoffed. “The
brujos
already did their locusts.”

“Sand,”
Sanchez gasped. “It’s a tornado of sand. I saw this when I held the stone, Charlie. Wind, sand, a tornado…”

Charlie remembered someone telling him how Sanchez had said these very words right before he had gone into convulsions on Wayra’s back porch.
“Get inside,”
he hollered. “That sucker is headed toward us.”

They dashed for the depot’s nearest door, Jessie barking wildly, several young people racing after them. Charlie expected the depot to be locked, but when Sanchez pulled on the handle, the glass door swung open, and they darted inside. Seconds before the door shut, Illary flew into the building and landed on the back of one of the benches.

Except for the benches, the depot was empty and had been for a long time. Anything of value had long since been removed and auctioned off or taken to a museum in the city. The depot’s glass door and picture windows were equipped with aluminum shutters and Charlie found the circuit box that controlled them. But since the depot was no longer used, the power had been turned off.

“The benches,” he said urgently. “Let’s stack them up against the windows and doors.”

Two of the young men grabbed either end of a heavy bench and hauled it toward the door. Charlie and the others pitched in, and within minutes, six benches were stacked to the top of the glass door and windows. The only bench they hadn’t touched was the one where Illary perched.

“What’s with the hawk?” one of the young men asked.

In a flash, Illary shifted and snapped, “The hawk is here to tell you that something very wicked this way comes.”

The kid drew back, his expression seized up in shock and horror. “What the…”

Fuck, Charlie thought. Illary’s shift was incomplete. Hawk feathers grew from her hairline, spread out across the top of her skull, and fell past her shoulders, like an Indian headdress. She ran her hand over the feathers and looked at Charlie, Karina, Maddie, each of them, looked slowly and deliberately, accusingly.

“Yeah, I know. The shift doesn’t work right anymore. Nothing works right anymore. I’m going into El Bosque with you. The tornado was born there. It or something else ripped apart the whiteness and several hundred people need a way to get to safety. That’s our job.”

The kid backpedaled and joined his two friends, who gawked at Illary as she hurried over to one of the peepholes in the barricade of benches. Since the benches weren’t all the same size or even the same size as the windows, the barricades had rather large peepholes at either end. Charlie and his group followed Illary to her peephole, Jessie hugging Sanchez’s side, and the young people huddled together at the other end.

“So the disappearance of El Bosque didn’t kill everyone?” Maddie asked.

“I don’t know about everyone,” Illary said. “I was about three hundred feet up when that tornado tore open the whiteness and it didn’t take long for people to begin fleeing. They’re panicked and confused.”

“Did you attempt to get in there?” Charlie asked. “To look for Wayra, Tess?”

“I couldn’t get anywhere near it. But I think the ghost train can.”

“Well, where
is
it?” Leo asked impatiently.

“Maybe it’s hiding from whatever wickedness is headed our way,” Maddie said.

Charlie heard the tornado before he saw it, a roller coaster roaring out of control, a sound so powerful it rattled the windows and shook the door violently. The stacked benches trembled, threatening to topple. And then, through the peephole, he saw it, a swirling maelstrom, a thing so huge and grotesque he knew it had to be a supernatural construct. A tornado conjured into being by who or what?

Esperanza had never been afflicted by tornados. Never. Not a single tornado in five hundred years. The weather in Esperanza simply wasn’t conducive to tornadoes. But this tornado swept over the depot, hurling granules of sand and dirt so sharp, at such high speeds, that they pierced the glass. Sand seeped through the openings and cascaded to the floor. So much sand poured through the spaces between the benches that it piled up a foot high, driving all of them away from the windows and doors, deeper into the empty depot.

“This isn’t a normal tornado.” Leo had to yell to be heard. “Otherwise the depot roof would be gone.”

The roof was still intact, but it throbbed like a drum. The tornadic fury seized the building and shook it like dice in a gambler’s fist. Even though it seemed to withstand the assault, sand streamed through a vulnerable spot in a corner of the ceiling where the wind had torn something loose. In minutes, that corner of the depot looked like a beach. Charlie went over to it, drew his fingers through it. White, it was perfectly white, as soft as an infant’s skin, and felt like beach sand, something from a north Florida beach, Pensacola, Panama City. Yet, when it had hit the building and the glass, it was razor sharp.

Dichotomies, he thought. Vivid contrasts. The landscape of Esperanza now changed so swiftly, so abruptly, that nothing could be taken for granted. Just look at Illary, with her head of feathers. Or look at himself and Karina, unable to assume their customary virtual forms or to get into El Bosque after it had been disappeared. Look at Sanchez … And on it went, a cascade of
you can’t, you won’t, impossible.

Charlie suddenly felt so exhausted, so spent, so completely drained of energy and will that he sank onto the bench with the others, and barely stifled an urge to crawl under it and hide.

2.

The storm began to ebb. The wind still blew, but not like before. Charlie shot to his feet and hurried over to the peephole. The others crowded around him. Sand blew through the air, cellophane and other trash tumbled like weeds across the platform. All the garbage cans had been blown over, spilling stuff everywhere, and the wind had whipped it all into a frenzy.

Off to Charlie’s right, perhaps a mile down the track, something became visible in the falling sand, and emerged with form, shape, substance. Esperanza 14. The train sped toward them, light and sand flying away from it. Even from his limited viewpoint, Charlie could see the train’s illuminated windows, the silhouettes of people inside. Its plaintive whistle rang out, light abruptly exploded from the crevices and cracks in the old depot. The concrete glowed, then appeared to expand from within, like a hot air balloon.

“That’s it,” Newton shouted. “Our cue!”

Newton lurched toward the front door and wrestled with the benches stacked against it. The entire barricade tumbled to the floor. Newton pulled the door open and the sand that had drifted up against it poured across the depot floor. They trudged through it, bodies slanted into the wind, arms thrown up to protect their faces. By the time they reached the platform, the wind had stopped altogether. The sand continued to fall, as silent as snow.

“From this point on, there’s no going back,” Karina said, her mouth close to his cheek. “Are we ready for that?”

Charlie kissed her fully. And in that kiss he tasted all the possibilities, the permutations, the promises waiting to be fulfilled. But he had no idea what those possibilities, permutations, or promises might be.

The train clattered and clunked its way up the track, an artifact from the late nineteenth century, a coal-belching machine that didn’t look as if it could travel even a few miles without breaking down. Sand peeled away from it and a brilliant light radiated from it. Charlie felt he was seeing the train the way Esperanza wished for him to see it or as the train wished to be seen, a bright, shiny, sleek, and powerful contraption that would get them where they wanted to go.

“It’s the ghost train,” someone shouted in Spanish, and the hipsters poured into the station, onto the platform. “The falling sand has made it visible.”

They giggled and laughed and pointed, the sand falling over them, and snapped photos with their cell phones and tiny digital cameras, their excitement radiating from them like an odor. Charlie ran over to them, waving his arms and herding them away from the edge of the platform. “Get back, get back so you don’t fall onto the tracks. The train’s wheels will crush you.”

Would they? Was that part true?

One of the hipsters, a young man, swaggered through the accumulated sand and waved his bottle of Dos Equis at Charlie. “Who the hell’re you, huh? What d’you know?”

“More than you do, asshole.” Sanchez stepped forward, his tall, slender form illuminated by the light that radiated from the ghost train, his arms flung out at his sides. “So move the fuck back.”

The young man hurled his Dos Equis bottle at Sanchez. He ducked, the bottle whistled over his head and shattered against a pole. The young man stumbled forward, swinging his fist. One of the other men grabbed him by the jacket and jerked him back.
“Hombre, déjalo. Estás borracho.”

Leave him alone. You’re drunk.

Charlie grasped Sanchez’s arm. “Thanks for intervening, Sanchez. But in this virtual form, I’m not an old man. Besides, I’m already dead.”

Sanchez laughed nervously. “Yeah, I forget that sometimes.”

Charlie and Sanchez hurried over to the others, and seconds later, the ghost train squealed to a stop. The conductor, a short Ecuadorian man with ebony hair, hopped down. “All aboard,” he called, then saw Jessie and shook his head. “No dogs…”