Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (28 page)

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 redheaded 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.

With her anxiety skyrocketing, she pocketed the phone and concentrated on fixing something to eat. She eyed the ingredients she had set on the floor: a small container of olive oil, two cans of tuna, wilted lettuce, some nuts, flat bread that probably had mold on it, a container of live bean sprouts, a bag of browning radishes, carrots that had seen better days.

She turned the frying pan over and used the bottom of it as her cutting board. She tossed pieces of carrots and nuts to the parrot, who ate pristinely, holding this or that in her claws, nibbling and watching her. The repetitive rhythm of the chopping and dicing stirred yet another memory, of herself and a man in a kitchen, where he chopped and diced with utter fury while something pummeled the building over and over again. She could only see the man’s hands, but the memory of the pummeling terrified her.

She scooped everything into her hands, dropped it all inside the frying pan, added olive oil, and fired up her little grill. Another vivid memory burst forth, of herself on a back porch somewhere, cooking on a regular propane grill, one that was waist high and had both a grill and a side burner. The grill stood on a porch overlooking a long boardwalk that jutted across a salt marsh and ended at the edge of a beach. The porch’s screens were ripped and flapped in a steady, humid breeze. Some of the trees in the salt marsh tilted at extreme angles, others looked ravaged by a savage wind. Pieces of the boardwalk were missing, the end of it had collapsed.

She could suddenly place the memory: the rear deck of her mother’s home in Key Largo, Florida, in the aftermath of a hurricane in 2005. The city’s power had gone down; that was why she was cooking on a propane grill. A hurricane seven years ago: was she missing seven years of memories? Or was she missing decades more than this? Key Largo was in Florida. Yet, she had no memory of ever being in Florida, much less living there. And she couldn’t even envision her mother in this place. And who was her father? Did she have siblings? Pets? What was her work, career? What were her passions? Whom did she love?

Her head ached with questions, so she turned her attention back to her cooking. When she finally bit into her wrap, juice dripped down the inside of her arm and she welcomed it, licked at it, couldn’t waste a single drop. Afterward, she sat there for a few minutes, eyes closed, savoring the sensation of fullness. She felt like a sloth.

She finally pushed to her feet, took the dirty frying pan into the back room and washed it in the sink. She also brushed her teeth, which went a long way toward making her feel human again. She packed up her little camping grill and supplies, brought out her sleeping bag and spread it open on the floor. She removed her shoes and socks and padded barefoot through the store, helping herself to a couple of flashlights, a package of batteries, camping pillows. She put the knife, one of the slingshots, and several of the smooth stones inside her sleeping bag. Once she was settled inside of it, she picked up her iPhone again, scrolled through the text messages, reread the one from this guy named Wayra and responded.

OK, no idea WTF u r, but need answers. Am @ deportes del bosque

She waited five minutes for a response and when nothing came through, she dug through the pack for a charger, didn’t find one, and turned off the phone to conserve on power. Then she squirmed down into the sleeping bag, her head sinking into the pillow. Her last thought was the parrot’s name started with a
k
.

She bolted awake sometime later and called the parrot by name. “Kali.”

The bird landed beside her.
“Bienvenida, Tess.”

Tess. That name again. I am Tess, she thought, testing the name, trying it on for size. It didn’t feel any more familiar to her now than it had when she’d tested it earlier, but she decided to claim the name. Why not? It was better than no name.

“I am Tess,” she said aloud. “But how do you know my name, Kali?”

Kali trilled softly and preened herself. As Tess dropped off to sleep, she wondered again how it knew her name. When she woke the second time, a tall man sat beside her, Kali perched on his shoulder. She reached for her slingshot, but since the parrot apparently didn’t feel threatened by the man, she didn’t, either. Besides, she recognized him from her iPhone contacts. Wayra.

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

She wanted to,
needed
to, but didn’t. “No. But I know your name is Wayra because you’re in my contact list.”

“Even if you can’t remember me, Tess, I hope you can trust me. We should move on. Neither of us is safe here.”

“I’ve been perfectly safe right here for a while now.”

“That may be. But if these bozos catch us, we’ll probably be stoned to death.”

“
Stoned?”
She thought of the two men in the park. “By…?”

“The ones who were in El Bosque when it disappeared. The … transition screwed them up. Question: can you see the dead birds everywhere?”

“Yes. But these two guys who tried to steal my stuff … I don’t think they could see the birds. Why would that be?”

“I don’t know,” Wayra replied, “Maybe it means your memories will return more quickly. Let’s get going.”

She and Wayra gathered up her belongings, piled everything into her cart, and the parrot perched at the end of it, squawking noisily. Wayra pushed the cart out of the store, onto the twilit street. She peered up and down the deserted road. Her head hammered, her heart beat way too fast, she felt like throwing her arms around this stranger, Wayra, and begging him to tell her what she needed to know. Instead, she barely managed to ask, “What’s going on here, Wayra?”

“A battle.”

“Between who and who?”

“Chasers,
brujos,
shifters, the living and the dead. I don’t know. None of the boundaries are clear anymore.”

“I don’t know what chasers or
brujos
are. And what are shifters? My memory is seriously damaged.”

Wayra’s frown thrust down so deeply between his eyes it threatened to divide his face in half. “Jesus, Tess.”

“I know. It’s bad. Thanks to my phone and iPad, I have images of people who are apparently close to me, but
I don’t remember them.
I don’t know much of anything about myself. But what I really want to know is, how do we win this battle?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“Now
that
worries me,” she said. “How do we escape this place, this limbo twilight?”

“I’m clueless. What I do know is where we’ll be safe from the crazies. And they’re numerous.”

“So let me get this straight. I supposedly know you well, you’re apparently here to get me out of this Bosque place, you managed to get in, but you don’t have any idea how we get out. Does that about sum it up?”

“No. But that’ll do for now.”

“Well, shit, give me a reason to go with you.”

Wayra’s dark eyes locked on hers, he kept his hands in his jacket pockets. “Proof, in other words.”

“Yes, I guess that’s what I need. Proof.”

He rocked back onto his heels and slipped his left hand from his pocket. But it wasn’t a hand. It was a paw, mostly black with streaks of white, the fur reaching nearly to his elbow, where the human joint and skin began. She didn’t know what to think of it, so she reached out and touched it, a real dog’s paw, the fur soft, the feet webbed, the claws well worn at the ends.

“I’m one of two ancient shape shifters in existence. The other one is my wife, Illary. There are two other shifters that I turned three years ago, when I rescued your niece, Maddie, from Cedar Key and the
brujos
.”

“But what’s with the paw?”

“Whatever is happening here prevents me from shifting fully, has stolen your memory, keeps chasers out, and traps
brujos
in their virtual forms. In other words, everything is fucked up.”

A memory stirred way down deep inside Tess and she relaxed into it,
willing
it to surface,
allowing
it to enter her awareness. And when it did, she saw herself waiting outside what appeared to be a bus depot, with a man who looked like a movie star, and a friendly black dog, a Lab, that got onto the bus with them.