Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (42 page)

Ricardo, seated beside him, suddenly sniffed the air and whispered, “People. Close.”

Wayra cocked his head, listening. He sensed them before he heard or saw them, small groups converging, their collective bewilderment and terror infusing the air he breathed. A terrible urgency seized him. He glanced around at his group—Lauren with her legs drawn up against her chest, her forehead resting on her knees; Tess and Ian sitting back to back, propping each other up, her face pink and sweaty, her belly larger than it should be. Never mind that she now looked three months pregnant, an impossibility. The facts were simple: they wouldn’t survive another attack and might not even survive another abrupt shift in the environment.

“There are
brujos
among them,” Ricardo said. “And they’re stuck, like me, in their virtual forms.”

“So they don’t present any threat to us.”

“How could they?” He wiped his massive arm across his sweating forehead. “They can’t seize anyone. They’re as confused as the living.”

Here and there through the trees, Wayra could see them now, bedraggled groups, loners, families, couples. Then a man broke away from a small group and loped toward them, waving his arms. “Wayra! Ian!”

“Javier,” Ian shouted, and he and Wayra hurried forward.

In the blade of midday light that sliced through the trees, Javier looked as though he had been dragged through mud. His baseball cap, jeans, and shirt were caked with dirt, bits of gravel and earth clung to his hairline and unshaven jaw, his hair probably hadn’t seen a comb for weeks.

Yet, in real time, Wayra knew Javier had been swallowed by the black tide at the Taquina on December 14. Three days later, when Wayra had gotten into the disappeared El Bosque, with Ricardo hitching a ride, he had spoken to an amnesic Javier. Wayra didn’t have any idea how much time had elapsed since then. Hours, days, weeks? But when Javier flung his arms around Wayra and Ian, the lapsed time no longer mattered.

A visit to Javier’s bakery had been a part of Wayra’s daily life, of his rituals with Illary and, sometimes, with Diego and his shifter family, the humans he had turned on Cedar Key. He hoped they were still in Quito with Sanchez’s father. He hoped they weren’t en route back to Esperanza because he didn’t have any idea what—if anything—they would find. He doubted Javier’s bakery would be there.

The incredible coffee and baked goods, the lively conversation, the sense of belonging to a community: Javier represented all that. And Wayra suddenly felt that if they could hold on to these memories of how they fit into each other’s lives, then regardless of what happened here in Esperanza, there would always be some similar or parallel bakery in whatever this place was becoming.

“Dios mío,”
Javier murmured breathlessly. “It is so good to see you both.” His huge dark eyes brimmed with emotions—terror and love, confusion and acceptance, panic and resignation, doubt and faith, so many stark contrasts. “I … I…” Then his head dropped, chin nearly touching his chest, and he started sobbing.

“Hey, amigo.” Wayra slung an arm around the other man’s shoulders. “It’s okay. You’re with friends now.” He urged him forward toward Tess, Ricardo, and Lauren.

“It’s a miracle, Javier,” said Ian. “The last time I saw you, the black sludge was swallowing you.”

“Now we’re … in a jungle. How’d … we get into a
fucking jungle
?”

“The city is awake and conscious,” Wayra replied.

Javier shook his head, a small, desperate shake. “I … I don’t know what that means. I was sitting in my house in El Bosque and suddenly … suddenly these memories crashed into me and I ran … out into my front yard and saw the moon. Saw it for the first time since I don’t know when. And … and then I ran.”

Ian urged him to sit down and handed Javier his bottle of water. He gulped down what was left, wiped his arm across his mouth, and looked at each of them as if really seeing them for the first time since he’d joined them. “Tess? You’re … pregnant? But how, I mean,
Dios mío,
was El Bosque locked in that twilight for months?”

“I think my pregnancy was fast-tracked because I got trapped in El Bosque, too. I figure I’m about three months along now.”

Javier’s eyes widened with a sudden comprehension. “It makes sense. The spinning clocks, the elevated EM readings, the weirdness. Time is accelerating, right? That’s how it feels to me, everything flitting past like a dream, yeah, yeah, I get it.” He paused, pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Wow. Fuck.” Javier took several deep breaths, his hands dropped to his thighs. “This is it, isn’t it, Wayra, the choice we used to talk about in the bakery?”

“I think so. Why did you feel you should go to the depot?”

Javier rolled the bottle of water across the back of his neck. “After my memories started returning, when I ran out into the road and saw all these panicked people, I just
knew
I was supposed to go to the depot. Others knew it, too. There are dozens of small groups, probably more than a hundred people headed to the depot.”

“Then let’s get going.” Ian grasped Tess’s hand, pulling her to her feet. “It shouldn’t be much farther.”

They set their pace to Tess’s and moved through the steaming heat. The jungle began to thin, and although Wayra could still hear the monkeys screeching, the sounds remained distant, like background noises in a dream. Towering thunderheads darkened the sky and crackled with luminous blue lightning. Thunder rumbled menacingly and echoed so loudly through the jungle that it was as if its source were the jungle itself. Then the lightning leaped from the clouds and tore across the sky, unzipping it, and torrential rains poured out.

A fierce and violent wind howled through the trees, hurling the lashing rain into their faces, making it almost impossible to see, much less move. They made their way to where the canopy was thickest. But rain streamed down through the branches and leaves, and water rose so quickly around them that within minutes, it was two feet high, washing around Wayra’s knees.

“We need to get to higher ground,” Wayra shouted.

His hands created a shield above his eyes so that he could keep the rain out of them long enough to spot a better location. But the rain fell too furiously for him to see farther than six inches in front of him. The river, a rushing tide of fallen vegetation, rose so swiftly that the dozens of people around them surged forward, trying to outrun it. Some were trampled, others were swept away, their screams and shouts swallowed by the pounding rain, the shriek of the wind.

Ricardo caught up to Wayra and gestured wildly to the right, where the ground appeared to slope upward. They linked arms and moved rapidly through the trees, a conga line that grew longer as others joined them.

The ground rose steadily and steeply, the rain burst erratically, like hiccups, the wind gusted and shrieked through the trees. Then the jungle began to fall away behind them and tall, slender pines rose on either side of them, bending like straws in the wet wind. The pines and tremendous boulders defined the boundaries of the path they followed, a soggy, unpaved road that climbed into high mountains.

Herds of sheep interspersed with goats emerged from the trees on Wayra’s left, all of them bleating and scared, and scampered across the road, the little bells around their necks singing. When the road started to even out, the conga line broke apart and people wandered over to the trees to rest and find shelter from the rain and wind. Wayra hurried to one of the boulders and climbed on top of it, hoping he would be able to see something familiar, to get his bearings. But when he looked out, his heart seized up. The only thing he saw was a vast plateau of water that rain and wind whipped into a churning froth. The jungle was gone, El Bosque was gone, Esperanza as he knew it was certainly gone.

Wayra felt as if some unimaginable weight had fallen from his shoulders. He hadn’t known that he’d carried that weight until just now and the sensation of its absence felt strange and unnatural to him.

If the endless water was another one of the city’s memories, was it an early memory? Somewhere back at the edge of time? Perhaps it paralleled the sinking of Atlantis or of Lemuria. Maybe it went back even farther than that. And what would happen when this memory finished playing out? Back to the Big Bang? Would they all be reduced to cosmic dust?

He didn’t see any point in venturing farther. For the first time since that black tide had swallowed part of the Café Taquina, Wayra despaired that any of them would survive to see whatever Esperanza was becoming. But maybe that was the plan, the bigger plan. Then again, maybe there had never been any goddamn plan and it was all just random chaos.

He made his way back to the others. He didn’t see Ricardo. Javier was talking to a group of men and women and children, Ian and Lauren were sitting under the pines and Tess was stretched out nearby, her pack under her head.

Ian stood, his dripping clothes clinging to his body like a wet suit, and hurried over to Wayra. “Any idea where we are?”

“No. We have two choices. Stay here and hope the river goes down or keep moving to see where this road leads. But I think the depot is gone and that whoever spoke to Lauren during her NDE was some trickster ghost, whose intent was to mislead us.”

Ian emanated a quiet despair. He raked his fingers back through his wet, dark hair, glanced up the road, then back at Tess and the others. “I say we keep moving until we can’t climb any higher. Ricardo went on ahead to find out what’s what. Let’s see what Lauren and Tess want to do.”

They hurried over to the women. Considering that Lauren had been dead back in the church, Wayra thought she looked remarkably healthy right now. “What’s the plan?” Lauren asked.

“That depends on what you two want to do,” Wayra replied, and explained.

“Move on,” Tess and Lauren said simultaneously.

“All right. I’ll talk to Javier and find Ricardo.”

Just then, Ricardo raced down the road, arms tucked in at his sides, his long legs eating up the distance between them.
“It’s there!”
he hollered.
“The depot is just up that road!”

His voice boomed through the drizzle and galvanized the isolated groups here on the road with them. Maybe forty people, Wayra figured. But in the jungle, there had been more than a hundred. Had the others been swept into the river? Had they taken an alternate route? A haze of exhaustion made it difficult to think, to connect any dots.

Suddenly, they were all on the move again, Ricardo leading the way, carrying a young boy. The road ascended steadily, the rain fell in fits and starts, and as they neared the summit, the sun struggled to show itself.

It sat low in the sky, its position all wrong. But it didn’t matter, Wayra thought. The sun gave off enough light for him—for all of them—to see the El Bosque train station half a mile ahead. It was separated from them by a chasm fifty feet wide and at least three hundred feet deep, the two sides connected by some ridiculous, rickety suspension bridge made of rotting wood, rope, and wire, something out of an Indiana Jones movie. Other buildings were around it, but from this distance, Wayra couldn’t tell what they were and couldn’t recall what had been in the vicinity of the depot when El Bosque was normal.

Right then, Wayra understood it had all been a test. Everything that had happened since the black sludge had swallowed parts of the café had demanded that each of them make a choice: you could leave with Esperanza when it was removed from the physical world, or you could stay behind in whatever would replace it.

Their decisions weren’t necessarily fully conscious; Wayra knew that psychological forces were at work here, something unseen, hidden. The power each person had disowned throughout the course of his or her life now bobbed to the surface. You could run from it and leave with Esperanza to the nonphysical, or you could stay behind and confront it.

Do I really want to cross that awful bridge? And if I get to the other side what will I find?
Would Illary be there? Would any aspect of his life, as he had known it for the last thousand years, be waiting for him?

2.

Ian eyed the flimsy suspension bridge. In the reluctant light, it didn’t look as though it could sustain the weight of an army of ants much less that of forty-plus individuals.

He knew he could make it across, he had no fear of heights, and felt it was important to have someone on the other side as people attempted the crossing. A cheerleader on the far side of nothingness. Yeah, he could do this.

“I’m going across so someone will be on the other side to help people off.” He hugged Tess quickly, slung his pack over his right shoulder, and moved to the mouth of the bridge.

The setting sun hurt his eyes, but when he shielded them, the entire bridge spread out before him, flaws glaringly apparent. It wasn’t more than a foot and a half wide, the old wooden planks were unevenly spaced, slick from the rain, the ropes looked weathered and bleached from the sun, the wires were rusted. Not exactly a sight that inspired confidence, he thought, particularly with the wind gusting through the chasm. In fact, the wind might be a bigger problem than the bridge itself.

He gripped the ropes on either side and tested the first plank with his right foot. It creaked, but didn’t fall apart. He moved forward like a toddler learning to walk. Five steps, eight, ten, fifteen. The bridge swung and swayed over the deep abyss below, a kind of Grand Canyon chasm, something so huge and incomprehensible that when he glanced down, he felt dizzy, nauseated not only by the height, but by the rushing, muddy river far below.

His left foot slipped and he went down, straddling the bridge like some awkward horseback rider. The gusts buffeted him and for long, terrible moments he couldn’t rise, couldn’t wrench his eyes away from the raging river in the abyss below him. The bridge swung and creaked, his hands tightened on the wet rope, and he forced himself to look away from the abyss, to focus on the depot on the other side.

Slowly, he brought his left leg onto the bridge, bent it so his shoe was fixed firmly against the surface, and brought his right leg back onto the bridge. He pulled himself up and stood there, hunched over like a cripple, gripping the ropes. Because he was so tall, he couldn’t maintain a tight grip on the ropes unless he was hunched over. It also made him less vulnerable to the wind.