Why had so much merchandise fallen from the shelves? Had there been an earthquake? Was that what had happened here? Was this quake or other disaster the reason she’d ended up living on the street, with no memory of who she was?
She quickly combed through piles of strewn merchandise and was delighted to find a razor, a bottle of shampoo, toothbrush, a heavy iron frying pan, a couple of hand towels. Never mind that the hand towels wouldn’t dry much more than her face and that she didn’t have access to a shower or a pot to pee in. She might be able to use a fountain in one of the parks to clean up.
Fresh clothes were the next item on her agenda.
At the end of the aisle, she looked right, then left, and a profound unease gripped her. A memory shifted around inside of her, something frightening, but she couldn’t grasp it. Why should going left affect her at all? To the left stood shelves of noodles, pasta, detergents, pet foods, paper towels, and toilet paper. That aisle led to the registers and was farther from the front door. So what? Why should she fear anything there?
She stared at the merchandise a moment longer, grappling for the memory. She seemed to recall a dark liquid spreading across the floor, but nothing else was attached to the memory.
She turned away from what triggered the unease, and was quickly rewarded with an aisle filled with water—Evian, distilled, volcanic, Perrier, some in plastic, most in glass bottles. She took what she could carry, eager now to get out of here and find someplace where she could clean up.
But when she reached the end of the aisle, a man stood beside her cart, examining the contents. Tall. Caucasian. Dark hair. He seemed familiar to her and she didn’t know why. “Hey, you,” she shouted. “Back off from that cart. It’s mine.”
The man jerked back. “Take it easy, I’m not stealing anything.”
The closer she got to him, the less substantial he looked. She realized she could actually see through him—the shattered window behind him, the carts piled high with goods, the stuff scattered across the floor. “You’re not real.” She hurled a bottle of Perrier at him and it soared right through him, struck the edge of the window and exploded.
“Hey,” he said quickly. “Tess, it’s me. Ian.”
“My name’s not Tess and I don’t know anyone named Ian.”
He abruptly faded away. Spooked, she quickly pushed her cart out of the market and down the street. Tess, Ian, Tess, Ian, Tess, Ian. The names slammed around inside her, screaming, Remember me, c’mon you can do it, remember me.
She remembered nothing related to those names or any others.
She went into a deserted clothing store. Merchandise puddled on the floor, hangers had been tossed around, the cash register drawer lolled like a giant tongue, and didn’t hold a single dollar bill. The place looked as if it had been ransacked. She moved through the mess, pawing through the clothes until she found a pair of jeans that looked as if they would fit her, a long-sleeved T-shirt, a lightweight jacket that reached to her thighs, a couple pairs of underwear. Forget bras, who needed a bra? Shoes, she definitely needed shoes, and went through a pile of them until she found a pair of workout shoes that fit her. Keens. They had lots of openings in them, were springy, blissfully comfortable. Multidimensional shoes. Wearing these suckers, she thought, she could become a comic book heroine.
She pushed her cart across the cobblestoned street and up two blocks to the park. The place was deserted—no couples sitting on the benches, no one feeding the birds, empty, zilch. In fact, the only birds she saw were dead ones, and they lay everywhere. Sparrows, hummingbirds, blackbirds, blue jays, hawks, wrens, ducks, even wading birds. But not a single condor.
What horror had killed them?
She pushed her cart around the dead birds until it was next to the fountain, dug out her soap, shampoo, razor, and set everything on the wall. She glanced around once more, making sure she was alone here, then stripped off her filthy clothes and eased into the water. It chilled her, held her, caressed her, and felt so utterly magnificent against her skin that for long, delicious moments, she floated in the fountain, her mind a perfect blank. She sank beneath the surface and the face of the man who had appeared in the market drifted into her thoughts. Was her name really Tess and, if so, how had this guy known that? If he was Ian, what was he to her? Why had he looked like a ghost?
She soaped up her body, washed and rinsed her hair, shaved her legs and underarms, then got out of the fountain and dried herself with a couple of the hand towels. Laughable. She put on clean clothes and her superhero shoes. She deposited her old clothes in a nearby garbage can, then looked around through the bushes and trees for a place to sleep. Why was it still twilight?
She didn’t want to think too closely about that, about the twilight. An inner resistance. Okay, she would honor that feeling for now and not think about it. Stay fixed in the moment, don’t ask questions, don’t think: that seemed to be the best way to fight her anxiety. Keep her head a merciful blank.
She pushed her cart into the monkey puzzle trees and pines, glanced back at the dead birds. What happened here? Why hadn’t they been cleaned up? Buried? Had whatever killed all these birds also stolen her memory?
“Stop asking,” she told herself, then dug through her cart until she found a box of garbage bags. She pulled out several and started collecting the corpses.
When both bags were full, she carried them into the thicket and searched for some place to bury them. Since she didn’t have a shovel or anything to dig with, she found a large pile of dead leaves, dug through them with her foot, and emptied the first bag. She spread the corpses out, so the leaves wouldn’t be piled too high, started covering them, then stopped to study them.
From what she could see in this truncated light, the birds didn’t have any obvious injuries. Had they all died at once? From what? No questions, no questions. But she couldn’t help herself. Nothing made sense.
She picked up a crow, lifted each wing, ran her fingers down its back, but couldn’t find an injury. She examined the crow’s beak, its feet, didn’t see anything unusual. But how would she, who couldn’t even recall her own name, know what was usual or unusual for a dead crow?
She set the bird down in the leaves, quickly covered it and the others, and moved deeper into the trees. She found a burial spot for the second bag of corpses. By the time she finished covering them, she was too exhausted to gather up more birds and decided to resume after she’d gotten some sleep.
Her eyes felt so dry that she wondered how long it had been since she’d slept. And where had she slept last? She couldn’t remember.
“Can’t remember” had become her mantra.
She plucked her sleeping bag from the cart, spread it out against the ground. She climbed into it with her wet hair, her clean body covered in clean clothes, her feet encased in the superhero shoes, and lay there, eyes wide open, staring into the twilight that spilled through the branches of the trees.
I am … I love … I am loved by … Nothing, nothing, nothing. Fuck. She covered her eyes with her arm and struggled against a rising despair. Without memories, she was nothing, a vacuum, an empty vessel.
She might have dozed off, she wasn’t sure, but when her arm fell away from her eyes, a pale violet orb hovered just above her. She reached up and touched it, and immediately sensed its energy was female. It felt familiar to her.
She pushed up on her elbows and the orb floated toward her, then hovered right in front of her. It looked like a transparent glass bubble, alien but strangely beautiful. The violet grew darker at the edges and paled toward the center, where it pulsed with light. She wondered if it was the soul of someone who had passed on. She remembered reading somewhere that orbs might be the souls of the departed. Why could she remember that bit of information, but nothing about herself? Had someone she loved died recently?
The orb brushed her forehead, a soft, cool touch, like a mother’s kiss, then it splintered and broke apart and the bits of violet light drifted into the air, blinking off a
nd on like fireflies. Was her mother dead? What did her mother look like? How could she not remember her own mother?
She watched the lights until they reached the edge of the park and winked out for good. For moments afterward she felt such an acute and terrible loneliness that she nearly leaped to her feet and ran after the bits of light. But just then, two men turned into the park, pushing grocery carts loaded with stuff. Their carts crunched over the dead birds, as though the men didn’t see them. But they saw her.
One of them said something to the other, laughed, and the taller of the two men strode toward her. Tess slipped out of the sleeping bag and stood, the cart between her and this man. Even beneath his baggy coat, she could tell he was muscular and probably outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds. Although she was tall, six feet without shoes, he was slightly taller. In the twilight, he looked Latino but not Ecuadorian, and young, mid-twenties, she guessed.
“Chica,” he said.
Without even thinking about it, she replied, “Chico. ¿Qué hubo?”
It shocked her that she not only spoke Spanish, but sounded like a native. It apparently surprised him, too. Because of her blond hair, he had probably pegged her as an American or a European who was unlikely to speak the language. “Ah, que bueno que hablas español.”
“I also speak English. What’s your point?”
In equally perfect English, he said, “My point, bitch, is that my friend and I need what you’ve got in this cart.”
He grabbed the front of it, she held on tightly, and he pulled even harder. She snatched the frying pan off the top of her stuff, shoved the cart at him, and he stumbled back, tripped, and went down. She whacked the pan against the soles of his sneakers and pushed the cart away from him. “It’s mine, asshole, and if you come near me again, I’ll bash your face in. Are we clear on that, amigo?”
He scooted back on his ass, but the man’s companion raced toward them now, his long hair flying out behind him, his shouts echoing in the air. “Serbio, take her from the right.”
Serbio, emboldened by his friend’s intervention, scrambled up, darted to her right, and his companion shot at her from the left.
Rage burst from her—rage that her memory was gone, she was homeless, that these two men threatened her. She spun, clutching the frying pan with both hands, and swung it like a baseball bat. It struck Serbio first, and he lurched back, shrieking, hands flying to his bloody nose. The other guy reacted quickly, deflecting a blow to his face that glanced off his shoulder. He tackled her and they both crashed to the ground.
She lost her grip on the pan, punched the man in the ribs, beat her fists against his back, fought to kick him off. But he grabbed handfuls of her hair and slammed her head against the ground. Fractals erupted across her vision, millions of pieces of splintered light that swirled into strange, frightening patterns. She tangled her fingers in his long hair and jerked with such force that his head snapped back. She somehow managed to twist her head to the right and chomped down on his wrist. It felt like her teeth struck bone.
He squealed like a wounded pig, she tasted his blood in her mouth, and as he reared up, gripping his bloody fist, she rolled away from him, swept up the frying pan, and slammed it over his head. He slumped to the ground and her eyes darted to Serbio, who abruptly stopped.
“You’re one crazy bitch,” he yelled.
She scooped up her sleeping bag, tossed it in her cart. “Leave me the fuck alone.” She moved away from him, her spine against the cart, pushing it, and swung the frying pan so that with every backward swing it clanged against the cart, metal against metal. The sound echoed menacingly in the strange twilight, and she kept at it until Serbio picked up his unconscious companion and quickly carried him over to their carts.
She moved around to the back of the cart, gripped the handle and pushed it rapidly into the trees. The wheels clattered over stones and roots, drooping branches snagged on her clothes. She glanced back several times, making sure that Serbio wasn’t following her, and finally reached a packed-earth sidewalk that ran parallel to the park. She picked up a handful of smooth stones, large enough to do some serious damage.
She tore up the sidewalk, desperately seeking an empty building, some spot like that clothing store she’d gone into, where the windows and doors weren’t damaged or ruined, where she might take refuge until she’d figured things out.
But the things she had to figure out staggered her comprehension. She felt like an ant in Manhattan, scrambling away from all the descending shoes. She had no idea who she was, where she’d come from or where she was, why she was here or what had happened that had transformed the sky into a perpetual twilight and killed so many birds and rendered her homeless. It all felt wrong.
Even along the road she traveled now, dead birds lay everywhere. She agonized every time she saw one and stopped again and again to pick up the corpses, put them in a garbage bag, and bury them under leaves. Shoddy graves, she thought, and wished she had a shovel. Or even a metal spoon would help.
Her ribs ached from where the man had punched her and her upper lip felt sore, cracked, swollen. She just hoped she hadn’t killed him when she’d hit him in the head.
A bird’s cry, the first she’d heard, prompted her to peer upward. A parrot swept down through the twilight and landed at the end of her cart. Shades of blue and green threaded through its feathers. An Amazonian parrot, she knew that much, and wondered why it hadn’t perished with the other birds. This parrot and the condors: they were the only types of birds she hadn’t seen among the dead.
The longer she and the parrot stared at each other, the greater her sense that they were old friends. “I know you,” she whispered. “You’re…”
She struggled to find the parrot’s name, but couldn’t. The bird suddenly lifted up from the end of her cart and flew across the street to a storefront. It landed on top of the sign, DEPORTES DEL BOSQUE, and another memory stirred. She knew she’d been here, shopped here, but details escaped her. Bosque meant woods. So was this the town of Bosque? Or was it a neighborhood? Every time she posed a question like this she ran into a wall she just couldn’t penetrate. But she felt the parrot had led her here because she would be safe in this place for a while.
She opened the door, pushed her cart inside, and somehow wasn’t surprised when the parrot flew in alongside her and settled on the edge of her cart again. “I’m starving,” she said. “I could use a portable propane grill.” The parrot stretched out one of its wings and preened itself. “A lotta help you are.”
Even though this place lacked electricity, too, the skylight in the center of the store was large enough to admit the twilight. In the third aisle she entered, she found a small, portable camping grill with a single burner and a canister of propane attached to it. Since it was a floor display, she didn’t even have to remove it from a box.
She hurried through the aisles, scouring the shelves for something she might use as a weapon. She found a hunting knife and two lightweight metal slingshots. She added them to her cart, set the grill up at the back of the store, then removed the items she would need to make a substantial meal. In rearranging everything in the cart, a backpack at the bottom was exposed.
Where had that come from?
Curious, she pulled it out, unzipped it. Clean clothes, an iPad, a wad of cash tucked in a compartment, and an iPhone. How could she recognize things like the iPad and iPhone, but not remember her name or anything else about her life?
She held the iPad out in front of her and snapped a photo of herself, then studied it. This is me? Her blond hair nearly touched her shoulders, her blue eyes looked pinched with fatigue, her cheekbones were blade sharp. Now that she knew what she looked like, she clicked the photos icon and went through photos of herself with people she didn’t recognize, didn’t remember.
In one picture, a tall, dark-haired man had his arm around her shoulders and she recognized him as the man she’d seen in the market. Ian. He felt comfortable to her. The pretty r
edheaded woman who clowned with another dark-haired man also felt right to her.
But comfortable and right didn’t cut it. She craved details. Who were they to her? “Ian, Ian,” she murmured, and wondered what the redhead’s name was.
The next photo captured her. The woman had salt-and-pepper hair, a compact, slender body, and she was holding hands with the handsome gray-haired man standing beside her. They appeared to be in front of an apartment building and looked blissfully happy.
This woman, she suddenly knew, was her mother. She couldn’t remember anything about her—no name or personal info, but her face spoke to some part of Tess that remembered.
Since the text message icon on her phone was lit up, she pressed it. The message, sent at an unknown time on December 19, 2012, read:
Your name is Tess Livingston. You’re in El Bosque neighborhood, which the chasers have parked in this twilit place until they have enough brujos trapped inside to take it into the nonphysical world. Send me your location. I’ll come to you. Wayra
She said that name, Tess Livingston, out loud, hoping it would resonate, that it would trigger a memory, but it didn’t affect her at all. And who was this Wayra person? What the hell kind of name was that, anyway?
She pressed the contact icon and scrolled through a list of names. Some of them had accompanying photos, others didn’t. She found Ian and Wayra, but she also found other names—Maddie, Nick, Mom, Leo, Illary, Expat—and none of them resonated. She felt gratified that next to MOM was the photo of the woman with the salt-and-pepper hair. And Leo was apparently the gray-haired man she’d seen with her mother in the photo.
The longer she studied Ian’s photo, the more frustrated she felt that she couldn’t remember anything about him.
The photo of Wayra showed a handsome man with high cheekbones, sensuous mouth, piercing eyes, curly dark hair that fell to his shoulders. It didn’t resonate for her at all. In his text message, Wayra mentioned chasers and brujos. Brujo meant witch, but why would this Wayra person mention witches? She didn’t have any idea what chasers were.
Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) Page 21
