Apparition (The Hungry Ghosts) (20 page)

Mile after mile swept past.
“¿A dónde vamos?”
she yelled. Where’re we going?

As if in response, the line of carts slowed down and people started getting off. She could see the tunnel signs now and was shocked that they were near the El Bosque neighborhood, fifteen miles from where she had entered the tunnels. How long had it taken? Five minutes? Six?

Tess jumped down from the running board and followed a small group toward the nearest exit. The line of carts continued on through the tunnels, gathering speed.

At least here, Tess thought, she could find out what was happening in old town, whether it was safe to return. And if it wasn’t, she would get a hotel room for the night and take a bus or cab back tomorrow morning.

When she pushed through the exit doors, she was relieved to hear only the noises of a busy neighborhood—cars, distant music, laughter. She trotted up the steps and paused in a small plaza where everything looked normal. Across the street stood buildings made of wood, stone, and concrete, family businesses that catered to the residents of El Bosque, as well as cafés, restaurants, and bars. A lot of people were out and about.

Tess slipped her phone from her jacket pocket; the hands were still stuck at 9:28. She checked for text messages, e-mail, calls. No, no, and no. Okay, first she needed information.

As she crossed the street, she felt that same sensation she’d had before Ricardo had materialized in her car. That she wasn’t alone. She paused on the curb on the other side and whispered, “Dad? Or is it you again, Ricardo?”

No one materialized. But the sensation persisted as she followed the earthen sidewalk past bars and cafés. Something was shadowing her.

From a jukebox somewhere, Julio Iglesias sang about love won and lost. Couples emerged from bars holding hands, laughing. Families with young kids got into and out of cars. Life in El Bosque apparently hadn’t been disrupted by locusts or
brujo
attacks. It was as if the neighborhood existed in another reality altogether. Had they even heard about what was happening in old town?

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that Esperanza was a massive experiment designed by some higher consciousness. If that was true, then the city was a biblical fable that had leaped to life in 3-D, HD Technicolor, and surround sound, and all of them were just actors on this vast stage who lived and learned as events unfolded. Sort of like life.

Tess stopped in front of Mercado del León, and debated about actually going inside to find out the time. Suppose the clocks here were all stopped at 9:28? What then? Did it mean an attack was imminent? She glanced at the church where she had taken refuge just a day ago.

The hands on its clock tower spun wildly.

She stared at it a moment, anxiety crawling through her, then hurried into the market.

Lines at both registers snaked back into the narrow aisles, merchandise occupied every available space, kids fussed and whined, adults looked anxious and tired, the clerks were rushed and irritable. Everyone seemed edgy, uneasy, a distinct contrast to what she’d seen outside.

As Tess moved farther inside the store, she understood why. The small TV mounted on the wall flashed scenes of the bedlam in old town Esperanza, probably recorded by someone in the midst of it all. She saw the mob of protestors, the swarms of locusts, people dashing for the tunnels, and then the thick fog rolling across the plaza and through the street,
brujo
fog that must have arrived after she had run into the tunnel. The people inside the bodega apparently believed they might be next and were stocking up on food and supplies. It wouldn’t be long before everyone else in the neighborhood got wind of this.

She looked around for a clock but didn’t see one. She made her way to the customer service counter on the far side of the store and got in line. A short line, three people ahead of her. No one in sight wore a watch. But she bet they had cell phones.

“Permiso,”
she said to the woman in front of her.
“¿Qué hora es?”

The woman, a pretty Ecuadorian of maybe twenty, slipped her cell from her jacket pocket, glanced at it, and frowned. “How strange,” she said in slightly accented English. “My phone says it’s eleven-eleven. But it can’t be that late.”

Shit, what’s this mean?

The woman called to the man behind the customer service counter.
“¿Gustavo, qué es la hora?”

He glanced at the time on the computer screen. “It says one-eleven. That’s obviously not right.”

“My phone says the same thing,” exclaimed the clerk next to him.

The man at the front of the line whipped out his cell. “I’ve got eleven-eleven.”

Nine-twenty-eight in Esperanza and 11:11 or 1:11 here?

But 9 plus 2 plus 8 equals 19 and broken down that’s 10, and 1 plus 0 equals 1. So we’re talking 1, 1:11, 11:11.
“Holy shit.”

Alarmed, Tess spun around to race back outside. But a flicker of movement in her peripheral vision prompted her to glance right, toward the aisle closest to her.

In the middle of the aisle, a black wave spread like oil across the concrete floor and moved up the wall, swallowing boxes of cereal, bags of rice, canned goods, whatever stood in its path. A boy of three or four saw it, too, and screamed for his mother and backpedaled away from it. But another wave of black spread out behind him, trapping him on an island of concrete between the two black waves.

As Tess ran toward him, the boy’s mother careened around the end of the aisle, shrieking,
“Sáltalo, Hugo, sáltalo!”
Jump it. The dark matter was now at least five feet wide and the kid wasn’t big enough to jump over it. But Tess was.

She backed up to the end of the aisle, then raced forward and leaped. She landed hard but didn’t go down, and swept Hugo up in her arms. He sobbed and clutched at her, his mother kept shrieking, and Tess eyed the black wave that stood between her and Hugo’s mother, widening and spreading even as she stood there.

It’s alive.

“Ssshh, Hugo, it’s okay, it’s okay,” she said softly in Spanish. “Be calm, please be calm, and we’ll get across this stuff.”

But Tess didn’t have enough space in which to gather momentum. So, with Hugo clutched to her chest, she dropped to a crouch, then sprang upward and forward. In the strange, slow-motion moments when she sailed over the dark matter, when everything appeared in such perfect, painful clarity, she knew she would not clear the dark wave, that it would swallow her and Hugo with the same indifference that it had gulped down people at the café.

Then she slammed into the concrete floor on the other side, Hugo’s mother grabbed her son from Tess’s arms, and Tess’s left foot slipped off the concrete and sank into the abyss. A crippling cold seized her foot to the ankle, her entire foot went numb, and felt so heavy, so weighted, she couldn’t jerk it out.

“Oh Christ,” she gasped, and fell forward onto her hands, then her forearms.

She was vaguely aware of screams and shouts around her, of the stampede of terrified customers, of Hugo’s mother shouting at Tess to grab on to her hands. Tess did and the woman pulled and Tess started laughing, laughing hard, hoping that laughter would break the hold of whatever this was. Tears rolled down her cheeks, the tendons in her wrists and the muscles in her arms felt as though they might snap.

Her foot suddenly popped free and she collapsed against the floor, her foot numb yet aching, weighted and hard. She somehow scrambled upright and she, Hugo, and his mother hurried to the back of the store, Tess dragging her foot. She felt like Quasimodo, she slowed them down. She kept shouting, “The exit, get out through the rear door.”

She glanced back; the blackness sped toward her, closing in on her. She hobbled the last few feet to the door and charged through it, but not quickly enough.

The last thing she saw before the blackness swallowed her was the parking lot behind the store and Hugo and his mother stumbling into it, away from the black wave. Then the darkness swept over her head and the numbing cold claimed her completely.

Twilight

The universe can be thought of as an information processor. It takes information regarding how things are now and produces information delineating how things will be at the next now, and the now after that.

—Brian Greene,
The Hidden Reality

Ten

Discoveries

DECEMBER 17–18

1.

Ian woke in a top bunk bed, in a dorm of bunk beds, in the basement of Santa Rosa Church. He felt strangely disconnected, as though he’d left part of his body back in the Pincoya. His eyes were dry from lack of sleep and all the smoke he’d inhaled had irritated his throat.

He had stayed up for hours, monitoring the news and talking with Pedro and some of the other church refugees. He had called Tess repeatedly after his phone had charged, called from the landing on the stairs thirty feet up, but she hadn’t answered. That worried him. Hell, everything worried him.

Since the dorm lay forty feet underground and there weren’t any windows, he didn’t know if the sun had risen yet. When he glanced at his watch, it read 9:28, but he quickly realized his watch had stopped. Ian sat up, his long legs hanging over the side of the bunk, and slid his hand under the pillow, patting around for his iPhone. It was fully charged, but didn’t have a signal and, oddly, the time on the phone also read 9:28.

Weird. And because this was Esperanza, the weirdness probably was significant.

He climbed down the ladder, into the glow of the night-lights that kept the dorm softly lit. Most of the bunks were occupied. That meant it was probably still early.

He found his shoes lined up with other shoes along the baseboard, and every pair held a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste. A cart against the opposite wall held stacks of towels and small bars of soap. The church took care of its refugees, he thought, and wondered what little elf had delivered these essentials.

Ian pocketed the toothbrush and toothpaste, slipped on his shoes, helped himself to a towel, and walked down the narrow corridor to one of the five restrooms. Most of the church sanctuaries in the city and surrounding suburbs were built to accommodate hundreds of refugees and were usually larger than the churches built on top of them. This church was no exception. The sanctuary beneath the church was cavernous.

He smelled coffee and food and suspected that in the common room he would find a full buffet breakfast, computers with Internet access, televisions with the latest news, a list of the injured and the dead. Even though the city hadn’t been attacked in more than four years, the emergency procedures apparently had snapped into place when it counted.

In the restroom, thirty sinks lined one wall, thirty stalls lined the opposite wall, and thirty showers lined the third wall. Except for two other men, Ian had the place to himself. As he brushed his teeth, he thought that the face staring back at him from the mirror over the sink looked haggard, older, eyes pinched with anxiety. Or, as Tess might say,
George Clooney with a thick five o’clock shadow and circles under his eyes.

He dropped his towel in a bin, then returned to the dorm for his pack and hurried off for the common room. The church employees were still bringing food out to the buffet table, a feast that featured eggs cooked every which way, fresh fruits, cereals, black beans, rice, and plantains, both baked and fried. There were juices, bacon, sausages, a variety of breads and jams. As Ian got in line with a handful of other people, he noticed the time on the wall clock: 9:28. He then overhead a man and a woman talking about how the time on their cell phones appeared to be stuck at 9:28.

He sat at a table by himself, where he could watch one of the three TVs in the common room. Tuned to the local station, all three TVs showed scenes from last night’s attack—the mobs pouring through the park and into the street in front of his apartment building, the swarms of locusts and the hovering field of flames, the aftermath of ruin and destruction. A ticker tape beneath these scenes kept a running tab on casualties: 103 injuries, 72 dead. Ian was grateful and surprised that the toll wasn’t higher.

But why wasn’t the news also covering this strange anomaly with the time?

More people arrived in the common room, Pedro among them. The priest came over with a plate of food and a mug of coffee. “I’m so glad you haven’t left yet.” He set everything down and pulled out the other chair. “Can you believe this?” He gestured toward the television screen. “They attacked in retaliation for what we did at the Pincoya, Ian. I’m sure of it. What a tragic mess.”

“Like we talked about last night, Pedro, we did the right thing. We sealed their portal and cut them off from millions of other
brujos.
This battle was going to happen regardless. Have you heard from Wayra?”

The priest shook his head. “No. Not from anyone. You?”

Ian shook his head. “I don’t have a signal down here. Is the Internet working?”

“Sporadically. From what we can determine, the fire drove them out and things in the city are now quiet. The sun came up a while ago and we were able to use the webcam to survey the damage. The park across the street from your building is still cordoned off.”

“What’s with this time anomaly, Pedro?”

“I don’t know. There was just a brief mention of it on the news. It’s being attributed to electromagnetic fluctuations in and around Esperanza.”

“I suppose that theory came from the physics professors who’ve been studying this whole thing.”

“You’ve got it.”

Physics. Electromagnetic fluctuations. He really didn’t like the sound of this. Then he snapped his fingers. “Remember how I told you that Sanchez said eleven-eleven is a portal to higher consciousness?”

The priest nodded. “So?”

“Nine twenty-eight adds up to an eleven. Do you think eleven might be some sort of portal, too?”

Pedro looked troubled. “We should ask Sanchez. If it
is
some sort of portal, are these time anomalies a warning or a promise?”