Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1) (19 page)

“This is really, really bad,” I said.

I turned and looked into the bhagwan's eyes. I saw fire there, real fire in his eyes as he pulled us back across the gorge. It was like he was pulling us back with the power of his mind.

“I think my survival handbook would have been really useful right about now,” Zak said.

The bhagwan redirected his gaze to the wooden pulley-handle that Zak hung from. Zak’s handle was on the opposite side of the pulley from my handle and I watched as the bolts holding it in place began to slowly unfasten as if they had minds of their own.
 

“I don’t think any survival handbook covers this,” I said.

One of the bolts holding Zak's handle fell to the river below. I risked a glance down. Before that bolt could even reach the bottom, a second bolt began to fall. My arms were really burning now. I looked back at the bhagwan. It was his eyes that frightened me. They were boring into me like hot pokers. But it wasn’t just his eyes. It was his fingernails. I looked at them as we were slowly pulled back across the gorge. The bhagwan's fingernails were long and yellow like claws. Just like the claws I had seen in my dream.

“Zoe?” Zak said.

“Zak?” I replied.

“If I fall into that river, could you tell my dad that I’m sorry for some of the stuff I’ve been doing lately?”

“Like what?”

“Oh, you know. Talking in class. Stealing. That kind of thing.”

“You’re not going to fall.”

I didn’t get it. What did this bhagwan guy want? The map or for us to fall into the river? Maybe he was just really mean and he wanted both. Maybe he figured that once we were dead, he could get the map without a fight. I didn’t know. All I knew was that the final bolt holding Zak's wooden handle unscrewed squeakily. I didn’t want to admit to him, but it looked like Zak really was going to fall. I mean, what else could happen? The river seemed to get louder as it churned below. I didn’t know what to do. It was an impossible situation. My head began to hurt. I felt the pressure growing inside of my skull like my brain was a balloon that was being blown up to twice its normal size.

The bolt screwed out another half turn and Zak's pulley-handle broke free with a crack. An instant later, Zak plunged straight down toward the rocks. That was it, I thought. Everything was over. Then I heard another crack. It seemed like the next moment happened in slow motion. I don’t know if it did, but when I looked down, I saw Zak flinging Stryker. Then I felt a stinging on my ankles and something like a snake slithering around me. It was the end of Zak's whip. Somehow he had wrapped it around my ankles. Suddenly the weight I was carrying more than doubled. I almost lost hold of my handle, but managed to tighten my grip. Zak dangled below me from his whip. I saw that he was biting his lower lip, trying to stay focused. The burning in my arms got even worse. Then I looked up as the top bolt of my own wooden handle began to unscrew.

“Nice save,” I said.

“Thanks,” Zak gasped.

I looked down. Zak was biting his lower lip again. “I don’t think I can hold on much longer,” I said.

Zak stared at my pulley-handle. “Doesn’t look like you’re going to have to.”

The top bolt fell from my handle. I couldn’t help but wince in fear. There were two more bolts to go. I looked across the gorge at the bhagwan. We were twice as close to him now.
 

“Maybe we should jump,” Zak said.

I strained to hold on to the pulley. “I’m not letting go.”

“Compared to that guy, letting go may not be a bad option.”

“Shut up!” I screamed.

Sweat poured off of me. The pressure continued to grow in my head. I didn’t know if I could stand it any longer. It really felt like my skull was about to explode. And I was scared to see what that would look like. Would my brains scatter all over the river? I didn’t know. All I knew was that the pressure was too much to bear. I needed it to stop. I needed it to stop right then. I looked down at Zak hanging below me. Just the sight of him dangling there, above the raging river, brought the blackness back around the edges of my vision. I was too terrified to think of what would happen if we fell. It was just too far down and there were too many rocks.
 

 
But I couldn’t hold on anymore. I just couldn’t do it. Not because the burning in my arms was too much. But because my head couldn’t take it. If my head was a balloon, it was way past bursting. I stared into the bhagwan's eyes. The pain was excruciating. My head was more than a balloon. It was a bubble. And then I felt a pop. I don’t know if it was my head or something else, but a flood of relief swept through me.

As I felt the pressure escape my head, I saw what looked like a burst of energy coiling toward the bhagwan. The burst looked like circles of mist or air, each circle a little bigger than the other, pushing toward the bhagwan like rings of power. It seemed to me like the circles were moving in slow motion as well, but I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t feel the burning in my arms anymore, though I did feel Zak's whip, Stryker, cutting into my ankles. But the sting of Stryker was nothing compared to the enormous relief I felt as the pressure leaked out of my head. It was like my brain was returning to its normal size.
 

I watched as the energy rings hit the bhagwan. He stood his ground at first, digging in his heels, but when the second energy ring hit, I could see it move him. The third energy ring actually lifted the bhagwan off his feet. I know because I saw the bottoms of his shiny leather boots. There were two little worn patches on the soles. By the time the fourth ring hit, I couldn’t see him as well because the energy wave was pushing us away from him, back across the gorge. I heard the pulley sing as it sped forward at lightning speed. Before the last of the energy rings had hit, Zak and I had already collided with the other side of the gorge. The force of the pulley impacting the end of the cable catapulted us into the undergrowth.
 

But it didn’t stop there. The cable itself snapped from its pine tree on the bhagwan's side of the gorge and whipped through the air toward us. Zak and I ducked for cover as the cable hit the branches above. Happy to be on solid ground, we peered back through the undergrowth. The bhagwan looked shocked. So did Rhino Butt. The others were picking themselves up off the ground. It took a moment, but then the bhagwan's look changed. He almost seemed to be laughing to himself. That nasty laugh worried me more than the fire in his eyes.

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

I led the crawl through the undergrowth to a point where we couldn’t see the other side of the canyon anymore. Then we got up and ran as fast as our feet would carry us.

We ran and ran. I couldn’t say how long we had been running, but it felt like at least an hour. Zak was ecstatic.
 

“You yogied him!” he shouted between breaths.

I looked over my shoulder. There was no cherry-red steam train bearing down on us, but it would soon be dark and we couldn’t very well keep running all night. We didn’t even have a flashlight.

“You yogified him! You’re the Yoginater!”

“Keep it down! I didn't do anything all right? The cable just snapped.”

Zak lowered his voice. “You snapped.”

“OK, I snapped. What are we going to do once he gets across that gorge? They’re going to find us.”

“I don’t know,” Zak said, running on the trail in front of me. “I guess we run.”

“All night?”

“What else can we do? Stop?”

“Well, I know we can’t run forever.”

I slowed down. It was already getting too dark to see. We were in a wide clearing. I hunched over and caught my breath. I was eye level with a number of reddish-green plants. The plants had long, wide oval leaves with a gentle tip on the end. For a moment, I thought I saw a flash of silver on one of the plants’ wide leaves. I sat down on the side of the trail. Zak walked back toward me. I tugged at the leaves of the plant absently, watching them break off in my hands.

“Fine,” Zak said. “You want to rest, we rest. Just keep your ears open. I don’t want that train running us down.”

I thought I saw a flash of silver on one of the leaves again, but when I pulled it toward me, it was just green. There was nothing there.

“Is there something weird about these plants?” I asked.

Zak cautiously examined the leaves.

“You don’t think it’s poison ivy do you? I got poison ivy once at Virginia Beach. It was terrible.”

“No. Not poison ivy. These leaves are bigger than that.”

A whole branch of leaves flashed silver and then gold.

“There. Did you see that?”

“I saw something.”

I stood for a better view. The entire clearing was filled with waist-high plants flashing silver and gold.

“That is a little weird,” Zak said.

But I wasn’t listening, I was looking at the plant directly in front of me. It had turned color. It was red, then blue, then green, like a flashing Christmas tree.
 

“Zoe,” Zak said, “you need to see this.”

“See what?” I said, still staring at the plant.

“This.”

I cast my glance up. It was darker now, dark enough to see that every plant on the hillside pulsed red and blue and green. The plants were everywhere. There was no portion of the hillside that wasn’t touched by their glowing, changing leaves. But then, something even stranger happened. All at once, the leaves turned entirely blue, then all red, and then a tiny yellow spot appeared at the center of the red field. The spot grew and grew until it looked like the whole field was on fire. Both Zak and I shuffled back, but there was no smoke. It wasn’t a real fire. It just looked like one. Where there were flames, I was now looking at a tall burning building. Staring down at the carpet of plants was like standing in the middle of a giant movie screen: each of the little leaves combined together to make one giant picture.

Zak and I watched the plants’ movie-screen leaves as the brick building burned. There was movement at a high window in the building. Inside the window, the room was full of smoke. The flames broke out in the room. A moment later, a brown wicker basket was held as far out the flaming window as possible and dropped to the ground.
 

The snow fell in the cold winter. I couldn’t believe it, but it looked like the whole field was now a raging snowstorm as the basket dropped to the ground. I watched as the basket fell through the air, heading straight for the busy freeway below. It seemed to fall slower than it should have. It didn’t flutter like a feather, but it didn’t drop like a brick either. It was odd, the basket fell almost like a parachute. Like it was slowing itself down.

 
Cars drove back and forth on the freeway, ignoring the burning building above. When the basket finally hit the ground, it landed on a peaked snow pile at the side of the freeway. As it landed, a newborn baby was visible under a checkered blanket in the basket. That’s when I started to get a creepy feeling, when I saw the baby. The little baby was wide awake, green-blue eyes staring into the darkness. The basket was unsteady and when the baby moved its arms, the basket tumbled off the snow pile and into the line of traffic. A set of headlights headed straight for it. The car was on a collision course with the basket. But just when the car looked like it should have hit it, the car bounced away, into the snowbank, almost as if it had hit an invisible wall. Steam blew from the hood of the car, the driver picking her head up from the newly inflated airbag to see the baby in the basket in the middle of the road.

The driver flung open the driver’s door and ran to the basket, her long chestnut hair blowing in the snowstorm. That’s when I got my second creepy feeling. A giant dump truck bore down, but the car’s driver managed to snatch the basket from the freeway just in the nick of time. The car’s driver looked at the baby in the basket. The baby was very young, only a few months old. I stared at the image of the baby fluttering with the leaves in the field of plants. I wasn’t one hundred percent positive who the baby with the green-blue eyes was. But I knew who the car’s driver with the long chestnut hair was. It was my mother.

This was getting weird. Not just because we were watching a movie in the middle of nowhere on the leaves of plants, but because that movie was beginning to look like it was about my life. The baby in the basket grew into a little girl in a crib with curly dark hair. The little girl played with a toy rattle, rattling it above her crib. But the little girl didn’t shake the rattle with her hand. The rattle simply shook above her head. The spots on the little girl’s hand glowed as the rattle moved. It looked like she was rattling it with her mind.

The scene in the leaves changed again. Now I was certain I was looking at myself. I was in the third grade. I was being bullied on the school playground by two older girls, one in a pink dress and one in a yellow dress. It was not my finest hour. I didn’t know why, but just looking at it made my stomach knot up in shame. The girl in the pink dress wrestled me to the ground. The other girl kicked me in the leg. Then, the one in the pink dress kicked me in the head. I didn’t want to keep watching. I knew what happened next. The girls tried to kick me again, but they couldn’t hit me. Every time they kicked their kicks were deflected. Finally, both girls ran away.

The wind rustled through the leaves and the scene changed again. But it was a familiar image this time. Zak and I hung from the zip-line above the gorge. The bolts popped out and I sent out an energy spiral at the bhagwan. Then the field went dark. Zak and I couldn’t see anything anymore. There was no color in the plants. We could barely see the plants or even each other. There was just blackness. But then we heard something. At first it sounded like thunder. But it wasn’t thunder. It was laughter. Loud evil laughter rained down from the sky.

The field of leaves lit up with a single image. It was the bhagwan and he was laughing straight at us. His fiery eyes drilled into us as he laughed, louder and louder still. It went on like that for several seconds and then it just stopped. The bhagwan's image disappeared. The plants went back to being what they were. And the laughter echoing through the hills was replaced by the sound of crickets.