Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (43 page)

He moved forward, his eyes darting from the depot to the surface of the bridge, the abyss visible between the planks. He blocked it out and kept moving forward, one step at a time. Halfway across the bridge, he paused and glanced back at the men and women and children who lined the edge of the canyon, preparing themselves for the crossing. Tess stood next to her mother, fists at her mouth as she watched him.
We’ve made it this far, Slim. We’ll make it the rest of the way.
Then he turned and fixed his gaze on the depot again.

In the strange light, it looked like a house in a fairy tale, its tin roof a chocolate brown, its many windows sporting bright red aluminum shutters on either side of them, the nearby pines bending in the wind like acrobats. He didn’t see anyone waiting on the platform and not a train was in sight. A red caboose sat alone on a side track. The parking lot looked to be filled with debris but he couldn’t tell if it was the result of receding waters or something else. The buildings around the depot appeared to be fading, but he hoped that was a trick of the light.

When he had about twenty-five feet to go, the bridge suddenly shook and Ian dropped to his knees and looked back. A fight had broken out as several men tried to get onto the bridge at the same time and the others attempted to hold them back. He didn’t dare release the ropes to move forward on his hands and knees and the bridge shook too violently for him to risk standing up. So he gripped the ropes more tightly and waddled forward, one foot, the other foot, left, right, left, right.

The bridge swung fiercely to the right, nearly hurling Ian over the side, and he twisted his head around. The two men, both on the bridge now, were locked together like mismatched lovers, punching each other, people shouting and screaming at them. Then one man fell back against the rope and toppled over the side, plunging into the chasm. His shrieks echoed hideously.

Jesus, get across, fast.

Ian stood clumsily, struggling to balance his weight against the other man’s. Terrified that the bridge would break and Tess and the others would be stranded on the far side of the chasm, unable to get to the depot, he moved forward as quickly as he could without losing his balance.

Ten feet.

Eight.

The bridge shook and swayed as the man behind him started running, shouting at him in Spanish,
“Get out of my way, gringo, get out of my way!”

“Stay back or we’ll both get knocked off the bridge!” Ian yelled.

But the man barreled into him and Ian pitched forward, arms shooting out to break his fall. He slammed into the bridge and the impact flung the other man over the side. The strap of Ian’s pack had slipped off his shoulder, down his arm to his wrist, and the weight of it pulled him toward the edge. He lifted his hand and shoved the pack over the side and clung to the planks in front of him as the bridge shook and swung.

Don’t look down, don’t look down, don’t …

His heart slammed against his ribs, blood roared in his ears, his fingers tightened over the lip of the plank.
Pull yourself forward, do it or die.

Ian moved the fingers of his right hand toward the next plank of wood, wedged his fingers into the space between it and the next plank, gripped it, and used his feet as leverage to pull himself forward. When the bridge stopped shaking, he reached up with his left hand, grabbed on to the rope, and pulled himself up enough so that he could rock back onto his heels and reach for the rope on his right.

The wind continued to whip through the chasm, but it wasn’t as powerful as it had been earlier, and he was able to cross the remaining few feet to the other side of the canyon. He sank to his knees, and gestured wildly at Wayra, hoping to make him understand that two people could cross at once if their movements were in synch, if neither of them panicked. But the deaths of the two men had apparently convinced everyone on the other side that civility came first, so that when an Ecuadorian couple started across, no one pushed or yelled or tried to butt ahead of them.

The woman froze up before she reached the other side, and Ian kept talking to her, urging her forward, but she refused to budge. Her companion finally caught up to her, slipped an arm around her waist and the two made it to the other side. The woman promptly dropped to her knees, sobbing with relief, and kissed the ground.

A woman and a teenage girl came across next and it went without a hitch. As Javier started across with the young boy Ricardo had been carrying, Ian realized the sky was changing again. The luminous blue lightning that had preceded the torrential downpour in the jungle now flickered and crackled through the waning light, but only in one part of the sky. Did it mean the topography was about to shift again? He felt a gnawing urgency to hurry things up.

Javier and the kid made it across safely. “You scared us, Ian.”

“Scared myself. Where’s the boy’s family?”

“Gone. Listen, Wayra and Ricardo are having a hell of a time over there with some of the men who don’t want them selecting who goes across the bridge next. They won’t fuck with Ricardo, he’s bigger than all of them, but—”

“I know. We need to speed things up. The sky’s doing weird shit.”

“Yeah, everything’s about to change again.” Javier turned toward the small group huddled together behind him and Ian and gestured toward the depot.
“Corren por allá.”

The group took off across the rocky terrain. “Go with them, Javier,” said Ian.

“You sure, amigo?”

“Go.”

Javier spun around and tore after the group.

On the other side of the canyon, Wayra motioned Lauren and Tess forward, but men and women in the other group charged past them, knocking Lauren down, and ran onto the bridge.

“No,” Ian yelled, waving his arms. “It’s going to break, there’re too many of you, it’s too dangerous!”

They stampeded forward and the bridge swung wildly, throwing them from one side to the other. A man and woman were knocked off their feet and the woman tumbled over the side, her shrieks echoing. The man rolled off in the opposite direction and clung to the edge of the bridge, pedaling air. His weight pulled down the right side of the bridge so that the remaining four people, three men and a woman, were forced to hold on to whatever they could grab on the left side to keep from sliding away.

They cried and screamed and pleaded for help. But they were in the middle of the bridge, which now sagged with their weight, and were too far away from either side of the canyon for Ian or anyone else to reach them. He watched in horror as the man clinging to the right side of the bridge dropped and the sudden release of his weight caused the bridge to flip over, hurling the other three into the raging river below.

“Shit, fuck.”

Ian flattened out against the ground and grabbed on to the ropes closest to him and struggled to flip the bridge over again, so it could be used. On the other side of the chasm, Wayra and Ricardo were trying to do the same thing. The light kept ebbing, but the lightning got brighter, more frequent, and cast a strange pall over everything. Then the wind rose and a gust seized the bridge, shook it violently, and flipped it over.

Ian steadied it as best he could and Wayra and Ricardo did the same on their side. Tess stepped onto the bridge and, a breath later, so did Lauren.

Ian rocked back onto his heels, rubbing his palms hard and fast against his drenched jeans, and whispered, “Please, please, please.”

He didn’t know if his words were a prayer, a supplication, or a plea bargain.
If you get them across safely, I will …

3.

Lauren held tightly to the ropes on either side of her. She tried to focus on where she stepped and not on the flashes of lightning that spilled an exquisite blue over the canyon, the bridge, her daughter, and rendered everything in such excruciating detail. She failed completely.

The lightning fascinated her, centered as it was in just one spot in the sky, a spot that moved about frequently, as though the lightning were seeking true north or its own source or something else altogether. When she’d first seen it in the jungle, she had marveled at its beauty—the sharpness, clarity, luminosity—and its color, an indescribable shade of blue she’d never seen before. Now she understood it to be more than a thing of beauty; it was a sign, a signal, and it seared its way into her consciousness and enabled her to see things more clearly.

And what she saw was that Tess now looked like she was three or four months pregnant. Never mind that Tess had not been pregnant this fall, when she and Lauren had sat on the balcony of a local café and talked about Tess’s desire for kids. And how much time had elapsed since then? Two or three months?

And yet, Lauren wasn’t sure. Her watch and its digital calendar hadn’t worked since 9:28 had begun appearing all over Esperanza. Even now, the hands simply spun, and the date showed zeros, just zeros. Her internal sense of time had vanished when she and Ian had climbed on board
Further
with Kesey, Garcia, and McKenna. But if, in real time—real time as it used to be—no more than a week had passed since the Café Taquina had been swallowed by a tide of black sludge, then Tess’s pregnancy was an example of how deeply the impossible had become their norm.

Leo had been seized by a
brujo,
a giant white crow had rescued him. She had taken Segunda Vista and ridden on
Further
with the Merry Pranksters, all of whom were dead; she had penetrated the whiteness that covered El Bosque, died and conversed with the soul of Esperanza. Now here she was, moving across a shitty bridge that traversed a canyon three hundred feet deep and on the other side of it lay a train depot where the soul of the city had told her to go. Uh-huh. She could lose her nursing license for this.

She suspected she already had lost her mind.

Gusts of wind whipped across the bridge, bile flooded the back of her throat, but she kept moving, right hand, left foot, right foot, left hand, forward, always forward. Tess moved slowly but steadily an arm’s length in front of her.

She couldn’t say for sure what Tess weighed now, but their combined weight had to be less than three hundred pounds. But that might be fifty or a hundred more than what the middle of the bridge could sustain at this point. She paused, allowing Tess to get a little farther ahead of her, and noticed the lightning had moved to a spot about a hundred feet above the train depot.

It burned like some biblical star, she thought, a sign, a signal. But of what? And as she watched it, she noticed that the buildings on either side of the depot simply faded away. And what were they going to do if the depot suddenly vanished, too?

Tess’s foot slipped, she went down clumsily on one knee, the bridge shook, and Lauren’s heart slammed into double time.

“I’m okay, Mom,” she called. “I’m fine.”

“Can you get up?”

“Sure. But talk to me, okay? Distract me.”

Lauren moved a little closer to her daughter. “I’m right behind you.”

“When did Leo give you an engagement ring?”

“The night of the black sludge.”

“How come you didn’t mention it to me?”

Lauren slogged through her memories. “Because I didn’t see you till the next day, at the café, when Diego was seized. Do you remember that?”

“Vividly. Ian and I made love in the shower. I felt fat and unattractive. That’s when I did the pregnancy test. When … what … date was that? How much time has passed?”

Lauren wished she had answers, but she didn’t. “I don’t know. Keep moving. Just keep moving.”

They moved against the wind now. Lauren desperately yearned to see Leo again, to hold him in her arms. She longed to feel the tangible reality he had provided for her since they had met more than four years ago, when she’d gone to the hospital for an interview as an ER nurse and he had hired her to work in OB, as his assistant.

You in that depot, Leo? Please be there.

“It’s not much farther,” Ian shouted. “A dozen feet, if that.”

Tess waddled forward and Ian reached out, caught her hands and pulled her into his arms. Now the traveling spot of blue lightning looked as if it were expanding, spreading like fire through the sky directly over the depot, with streaks of crackling blue arcing toward the canyon, toward them. Lauren felt the bridge behind her trembling as others started crossing it. She hurried as quickly as she dared, her feet slipping and sliding over the damp planks, her heart beating frantically in her throat.

The rope she gripped on her right, her handrail, suddenly snapped. Lauren threw herself the last few feet to safety and landed hard on her side. Air rushed from her lungs, she rolled onto her hands and knees, gasping for breath, and saw how the terrain on the other side was now shifting again.

“Hurry,” Ian shouted. “Cross now, all of you.”

Lauren saw how the surface of the rocks on the other side of the chasm now seemed to be ebbing and flowing, like water or light. Then the arc of lightning touched down and holes exploded open in the rock and fissures and sped outward from the center of these holes like threads in a spiderweb. The fissures traveled down the sides of the canyon wall and even from where she was, she could see them widening into cracks.

Lauren got shakily to her feet, terrified that the bridge wouldn’t hold long enough for Wayra, Ricardo, and the remaining two men and two women to make it to this side of the chasm. Planks in the middle of the bridge broke apart and one man fell through the gaping hole and vanished into the river below.

More planks gave way, another piece of rope snapped, and Wayra, in the lead, leaped the remaining distance and landed dangerously close to the precipice, arms pinwheeling for balance. Lauren and Ian grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him away from the edge. He lay on the ground, breathing hard, the fingers of his hand clenched against the ground, his paw jerking. Lauren thought he was having a heart attack or a seizure.

He finally raised his head and pushed to his feet. “Get out of here, all of you. What’s happening to the ground over there is about to happen on this side, too. I’ll stay till the others are across.”