Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts)

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Others ran out into the sand that covered the street, waving their arms and pointing skyward. One man stood in the middle of the road and yelled, “My memories, I have my memories back!”

  And so did she. Before the twilight had started crumbling, she had recovered fragments of her memories, isolated pockets disconnected in time. But now they rushed back to her like homing pigeons who knew where they belonged. They filled her, these memories, each one vivid, perfect, pulsating with life, remarkably clear. The twilight had not only stolen memories, but hoarded them, locked them up. Once a hole had been torn in it—that gaping mouth where Mercado del León had once stood—people’s memories began to return.

  “Do you feel it?” Ian said softly. “It’s not finished. There’s more coming.”

  Tess nodded. She knew what he meant. She smelled it in the air, like ozone before a thunderstorm, something heavy, thick, pervasive. The others seemed to smell it, too, and glanced around for its source, as though it might be emanating from a trash can or from one of the cars half buried in sand or from a burned-out building.

  They moved up the street, across the endless sand, she and Ian behind Wayra, her mother, and Ricardo, who walked abreast. In places, the sand had drifted up so high they were forced to find a way around it. In other spots, it simply formed a second skin across the surface of the ground, a thin, shimmering blanket of granules that flew upward with every footstep, like dust from another world.

  Tess noticed that her mother had linked arms with Wayra and Ricardo, one of those universal unity gestures that were part of every demonstration against a larger threat—war, segregation, apartheid, social injustices large and small. Ian tightened his grip on her hand. “They feel it, too, Slim. And so did the birds. That’s why they’re flying at night.”

  “They’re leaving Esperanza,” she said softly.

  They passed more crowds slogging through the sand, small homes buried to their rooftops, burned-out stores. A pack of barking dogs raced past them. Somewhere not so distant, fighting cats screeched. And always, there were shouts, sobs, cries of relief, fear, and flat-out panic.

  A quarter of a mile from the church, a herd of horses and donkeys stampeded toward them, forcing them to seek cover behind a sand-covered fountain. Following the horses and donkeys were flocks of chickens and ducks, another pack of dogs, a tribe of goats. Then giant shadows fell over it all, and when Tess looked up, her breath caught in her throat.

  Condors.

  Eight, ten, maybe a dozen of them, winged southward in a wide V formation, their wings moving in perfect rhythm, as though they were controlled by a single mind. They didn’t make a sound. Behind them was another, larger flock in a wide V formation, and behind them, a third and fourth flock. In all, there must have been more than a hundred of them, their white faces perfectly visible in the moonlight.

  Scavenger, vulture, predator: that was how they were usually characterized. But in Esperanza, especially among the Quechuas, condors were revered as powerful magic. But when the magic was headed out of the area, what did that tell her?

  Another memory surfaced and with it came a surge of emotion that nearly choked her. “Ian, I remember that when we were in the posada as transitionals, you were fascinated with condors.”

  “And you were fascinated by the hummingbirds.” He touched her chin and drew her face toward his and kissed her.

  Such desire rose up inside of her that she flung her arms around him and pressed her body against his.

  “Slim, Slim,” he whispered. “It’s okay. We’ll make it through this.”

  Would they? Could they? And what was this? What was it now? This second?

  “What will we do with twins, Ian?” Tess stepped back and touched her stomach, which seemed larger than it had been earlier.

  “The same thing we’d do with just one kid. Twins explains why you’ve been so hungry. You’ve been eating for three. Did Ricardo know if they’re identical?”

  “He didn’t say. Hey, Ricardo,” she called out, and he looked back. “Are the twins identical?”

  He glanced back, moonlight seeping into the deep frown that thrust down between his eyes. “I don’t know. And I don’t have any idea about gender, either.”

  “Wayra, you’re perceptive,” Lauren said. “What do you pick up?”

  “Only that Tess is pregnant. The—”

  The rest of what he said was lost in the thunderous arrival of cops on horses galloping through the street, chasing the crowds that raced out of El Bosque. Some people were trampled, others dived out of the way, and still others were seized, their bodies jerking, stumbling. Were these brujos using the cops as hosts or were they stuck in virtual bodies, just like Ricardo? Tess couldn’t tell.

  “All of you, get into those trees,” Ricardo shouted. “I’ll deal with them.”

  “Bad idea,” Wayra told him. “We’re grossly outnumbered.”

  “They’re my tribe, Wayra.”

  “They were your tribe. You’re no longer like them.”

  Ricardo slapped Wayra on the back. “Go, fast.” Then he ran toward the cops on horseback, waving his arms and shouting like a madman, all of them showered in moonlight that made the whole scene surreal. He stopped in the middle of the road, a tall, muscular, imposing black man with massive arms and a booming voice. “You can’t seize anyone here.”

  One of the cops on horseback galloped to within a foot of Ricardo, except that it wasn’t a cop. It was Naomi, as stuck in her virtual form as Ricardo was. She pulled back sharply on her reins and the horse snorted and danced. “You failed your tribe, Ricardo, just as your sister failed hers. We don’t negotiate with the living. We seize them.”

  “Naomi. This is madness.”

  “Madness is doing nothing.” Then she yelled, “Seize them, those of you who can seize, do so now!”

  Her horse reared up, its hooves just inches from Ricardo’s head, and he stumbled back as Naomi laughed and laughed.

  Shit, Tess thought, and pulled out her slingshot, jerked open her little bag of stones, and ran toward Ricardo. She fitted a stone into her slingshot and aimed it at Naomi. As she breathed in, she focused on her target, pulled back on the slingshot, and let the stone fly. It struck Naomi in the center of her forehead and she fell back in her saddle, dead before her head hit the horse’s flanks. She tumbled to the ground and her horse took off.

  Another stone, another target. But there were so many targets and the horses were so spooked by the commotion, the strangeness, the odors, their brujo riders, that she couldn’t shoot fast enough. All the brujos on horseback faced her and the mark on her arm burned and itched furiously. Tess pumped her arm in the air. “Come and get me, assholes!”

  Their horses raced toward her, hooves pounding the ground, brujo faces set with grim determination. Ricardo kept waving his arms, shouting at them to back off, and led some of them away from Tess. She shot more stones, hit some brujos, missed others, but all of them were suddenly less important than the trees that abruptly appeared around them.

  They sprang upward through the sand, giant sequoias and ceibas with branches that burgeoned outward in every direction. Hanging gardens of ferns turned gold in the moonlight. Thickets of huckleberry bushes appeared, stuff burst from massive trunk systems of trees she couldn’t identify, had never seen. She and Ricardo raced into this strange jungle, into the thick shadows that provided a measure of concealment.

  Tremendous braids of ivy covered the ground, their leaves so massive that Tess and Ricardo hid beneath them, close enough to one of the giant tree trunks that the horses missed them when they raced past. The vibration of their passage reverberated through her body.

  The odor that had haunted and unsettled her earlier now invaded her senses. Her hands sank into its wetness, its reality, earth so dark and damp and succulent that her arms vanished to the elbows. “Ricardo?” she whispered.

  “Here,” he whispered back.

  “Thank you.”

  “She … Naomi … hop
ed her horse’s hooves would strike me. Apparently we brujos can be killed in these bodies. I think she knew that. You freed her, Tess, and saved my ass.”

  Interesting that he used the word “freed” rather than “killed,” Tess thought. “What do you think this jungle means, Ricardo?”

  “Another Esperanza memory. Let’s go find the others.”

  They pushed up, the giant leaves slipping away from them, and darted through the deepening shadows. The wild lushness of the canopy prevented most of the moonlight from reaching the jungle floor. More trees sprang up around them, coconut palms, mango trees, shoots of bamboo that rapidly multiplied, as though the earth here were so fecund that years of growth happened within minutes.

  Had the sand seeded the jungle in some way? Was the sand seeding whatever would replace Esperanza? Was that what it had been about?

  As she and Ricardo darted toward a thicket of ceiba trees, Ian suddenly dropped out of the branches, Lauren dropped from another tree, and Wayra from yet another. “How many of them are left?” Wayra asked Ricardo.

  “I’m not sure. A few dozen. They’ve split up, gone in different directions. Like us, they’re more vulnerable when they aren’t in a group.”

  “They can be killed,” Tess said.

  “Given how quickly the landscape is changing,” Ricardo said, “I don’t think we can count on anything.”

  Even as they stood there, whispering and speculating, trees pushed upward from the ground, fully formed, as large as condominiums. With each birth, the air boomed with sound, dirt exploded upward, and they were forced to move, fast, to keep from being buried. Thick vines hung from the branches of these newly born trees and swung back and forth like giant pendulums. Their leaves, the size of cars, shone in the moonlight as if invisible gnomes had been polishing them. The gigantic fruits that hung from some of the trees—bananas and mangoes, coconuts and oranges and grapefruits—could feed the people of Esperanza for months.

  The air had turned humid, sultry, and hot. Tess’s physical discomfort was now so great she felt like tearing off all her clothes. She shed her dirt-covered jacket and tossed it over a low-hanging branch, then peeled away her pullover sweater and the blouse beneath it until she was wearing just a tank top, jeans, socks, her running shoes. She felt horribly fat, her belly now pressing up against the tank top. At the most, she could only be seven or eight weeks pregnant. But she now looked like she was three months.

  Beads of sweat rolled down her face, into her eyes. The muscles in her legs screamed, her stomach churned and growled with hunger. She stumbled once and Ian caught her hand, keeping her upright and moving forward, just as he always had.

  Suddenly, dozens of dense, bushy vines pushed up from the jungle floor as if summoned by some hidden snake charmer, and whipped across it like serpents, forcing the five of them apart as they leaped out of the way again and again. They zigzagged their way through the jungle, barely able to stay ahead of the vines that kept popping up from the ground, thrashing around like living things.

  Tess scooped up a stick and whacked the vines as they shot toward her. Then one of them whipped up behind her and wrapped around her ankles, jerking her legs out from under her. She knew that she screamed, but didn’t know if the others could hear her above the shrieks and cries of monkeys that now swung through the jungle with wild abandon. She landed hard on her hands and knees, twisted around, and grabbed at the vine, trying to rip it away from her legs. But it was too thick, too strong, and its grip so tight she felt her feet going numb.

  Near panic, she tore off her pack and slammed it against the vine. It simply tightened its grip on her legs and climbed higher, to her knees. As she swung the pack again, Ian barreled toward her and drove a knife into a section of the vine just beyond her feet. The vine loosened its grip and Tess jammed her fingers under it and tried to yank it away as Ian kept stabbing it and yelling, “We’re over here, I need fire!”

  Then he severed the vine and Tess jerked her arms upward and the vine slipped free of her legs and crumbled in her hands. She lurched clumsily to her feet and Ian grabbed her around the waist, steadying her. “Can you walk, Slim?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  The monkeys still swung, screeching, through the jungle, and Tess heard other animal sounds now, a cacophony of frogs, toads, insects. She and Ian ran toward a torchlight headed their way and Tess saw her mother, flanked by Wayra and Ricardo. Lauren swung a crude torch from side to side above the ground in front of them, exposing the vines that whipped away from the flames. Fire, Tess thought. The vines were terrified of fire, just like brujos.

  “We burned a way through this shit.” The monkeys’ screeches were so loud Lauren had to shout to be heard. “But we’ve got to move fast. The vines grow back together in minutes.”

  “They’re sentient.” Tess swept her bag off the ground, slung it over her shoulder, and fell into line behind her mother, Wayra, Ricardo, with Ian bringing up the rear.

  “It’s all sentient,” Ricardo said. “We’re moving through Esperanza’s memories. Tell her, shifter. You know it as well as I do.”

  “Her memories?” Lauren exclaimed.

  “More like a goddamn nightmare,” Ian said.

  “I think Ricardo’s right,” Wayra said. “The city seems to be … reliving her own history. When Esperanza was nonphysical, she could be anything she wanted to be—a jungle, mountains, an island, cold, hot, and everything in between.”

  Shit. Tess moved faster.

  2.

  Charlie reached the engine compartment first, Sanchez covering his back, the others behind him. The door was locked but it was also flimsy, and when he threw his young virtual body against it, all that mass and muscle, the door sprang inward.

  The engineer, standing at the console, glanced around and smiled and motioned them to come in. She was a diminutive woman with black hair so long and thick and gorgeous it invited fingers to comb through it, hands to caress it. The console she played like a piano looked like something from a science fiction movie, all lights and holograms rendered in 3-D. She got to her feet and came toward them. Her jeans had patches at the knees, the shirt she wore matched the pale blue of her eyes, she was barefoot.

  Jessie barked at her, but when she held out her hand, the dog went over to her, sniffed her hand, then stretched out her front legs, arched her back, and dropped to the floor.

  “So good to see you all,” she said.

  Charlie grasped her extended hand. The skin felt smooth and cool. “Who’re you, exactly?”

  “Oh.” She gave a small, embarrassed laugh, lifted her arms quickly, and became Kali, the Amazon parrot who had been his constant companion until she had dived into the whiteness that covered El Bosque. An instant later, she was the woman again.

  “A shifter?” Newton exclaimed.

  “Not at all, Newt. I’m the fourteenth council member, the quintessence of Esperanza. Kali, at your service.” She bowed deeply, mocking him, mocking the council. When she straightened, she fixed her hands to her narrow hips, a little teapot. “Did you really think this experiment would proceed without scrutiny? Without safeguards? That you chasers would be given everything without offering something in return? As it is, the impact of the events set in motion by the corrupt members of your council can’t be undone. So I’m trying to find ways around it.”

  “What … are you doing here now?” Karina asked. “Why didn’t you show up before?”

  “I was always around, Karina. I was in the posada for decades, where you all perceived me as an interesting parrot ghost. I lived in the trees around the city, I flew freely through restaurants, cafés, an intriguing anomaly for tourists and residents. Even the brujos could see me. They tried to manipulate and control me just as the chasers did and quickly discovered it wasn’t as easy or simple as they had hoped. Other trains are already picking up those individuals throughout the city who have chosen to stay behind when Esperanza is removed from the physical world. The people from El Bosque we’ll be pi
cking up will have the same choice, as will all of you.”

  “Even brujos will have a choice?” Pedro asked.

  “Certainly. They have been as much a part of this city as everyone else.”

  “They’ll fight you on it,” Karina said.

  “We’ll see.”

  With that, Kali slipped into the engineer’s chair, her fingers playing those intricate keys, and Charlie and Newton just stood there, understanding they—the chaser council—no longer controlled Esperanza’s destiny and probably never had.

  “Hold on, just hold on,” Newton burst out. “The council has served Esperanza faithfully for a millennium.”

  “Really, Newt?”

  Kali flicked her hand into the air and holographic images appeared of Newton and Maria, colluding, scheming, fixing votes, fucking. Even Maria’s choices for a future life appeared, images of Newton and Maria as peasants in some repressive regime where she was stoned to death for adultery and he, a meteorologist, was executed for prognosticating about the weather.

  Newton watched in horror, then burst into tears and ran from the engine compartment like a two-year-old. Charlie leaned forward, his mouth against Kali’s cheek. “That was cruel and unnecessary.”

  “Let’s see how you measure up, Charlie.”

  Another flick of her hand created holographic images from Charlie’s life, his snafus in court, his personal failings. He relived the time when he had gone out for drinks with a female prosecutor to whom he was attracted and got her to drop charges against his client. He hadn’t slept with her, he was married then, he loved his wife and Lauren was pregnant with Tess. But it had come much too close for comfort.