Ghost Leopard (A Zoe & Zak Adventure #1) (12 page)

“Well, if you can’t reach her, that’s OK. Please tell her we’re just checking in and we’ll see her soon.”

I hung up. I had left a message at the hotel front desk for the rent-a-nanny. I already knew I wouldn’t be able to reach my mother, so I hadn’t bothered to call. It wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but I remembered that both my mother and Zak's father had said they most likely wouldn't be able to talk for three or four days because there’d be no mobile phone coverage. I didn’t want the rent-a-nanny to freak out any more than she had to though. At least this way she could avoid sending the National Guard, or whatever they used in India, out to find us. Plus, just in case my mom had been able to call, I wanted to let her know that I was all right.
 

Zak, for whatever reason, didn’t seem too worried about what his dad would think about him taking off from the hotel. Maybe it was because he was a boy. I knew I didn’t get boys. All I knew was that Zak could be very selfish about the way he acted. I didn’t dwell on the whole thing any longer, because the creepy clerk had taken back the old telephone. The clerk’s fingernails were cracked and worn like claws. I didn’t like the way that he was looking at us with the yellow tint in his black eyes, so we left right away. When I glanced back though, I saw that the clerk was already whispering into a phone of his own.

After the phone call we got on a bus. It turned out that in order to get back we would have to either take a train back down out of the mountains, which didn’t leave for another two days, or take a bus to the next town in order to get back down to an airport. Since I didn’t want to wait two days, the bus was the obvious choice. The bus was old and beat up and decorated in flowers and garlands and bright colors. It had a big letter “T” on its front grill. I think it was a “T” for terrible. The thing looked like it was at the end of its natural life. Still, all in all, it was semi-normal. Semi-normal that was, until we got on board.
 

Inside the bus, wickedly loud Hindi music screeched through the aisles. Hindi music has got this crazy wail to it. It makes you want to get up and dance, but relax at the same time. I sat in the back with Zak on one side of me and a woman with a goat on her lap on the other. There were chickens and pigs in the aisles and I was pretty sure I saw a baby sheep in the overhead rack. The passengers were stuffed in absolutely everywhere. If you can believe it, it was even more crowded than the train.

What was bothering me more than the cramped quarters, however, was the fact that I had just realized that I had lost my camera. I felt at my fanny pack, but it wasn’t there. I knew I'd taken it out of my fanny pack at Mukta's and now I was sure I’d left it there. The bus was already sputtering down the road, so it was too late to go back. At best I'd be able to get Mukta to mail it to me. But not in time to get any pictures of India. It was a bummer. A real major bummer. As the bus twisted around the tight corners, I felt sick, like I could throw up at any moment. The inside of the bus was as stuffy as the inside of an oven. No fresh air, not even an open window in sight.
 

 
“So we couldn’t get in touch with the rent-a-nanny. What’s the big deal?”

“The big deal is she’s going to go crazy trying to find us. And her name’s Anu. If she somehow manages to get in touch with our parents they’ll be worried sick.”

I was just as guilty of thinking about Anu as the rent-a-nanny as Zak was. I don’t know why I had corrected him. Sometimes I could be a bit mean. I thought about saying sorry, but Zak spoke again before I could.
 

“You left a message saying we’d see her soon.”

“I did.”

“So?”

“So what?”

“So I don’t get the problem,” Zak said.

I looked at Zak. There I was, ready to apologize to him, and then he said he didn’t get the problem. I didn’t even know where to begin with a comment like that. We were twelve years old and running loose in India. Our parents were going find out one way or another and when they did, they were going to freak. That was the problem. I had no camera. That was another problem. The biggest problem at the moment, however, was that I felt like I might throw up.
 

“We just need to get back, Zak,” I said.

“My dad and your mom are gone for at least three more days. We have plenty of time. You sure you don’t want to look for this legendary magical Ghost Leopard?”

“You’re serious?”

Zak seemed to think about it. “Yeah. Why not?”

“I already told you why not.”
 

“You sure you don’t want an awesome picture of it?”

I didn’t answer him. But that was because Zak had somehow, in his general Zak dumbness, hit on the real dilemma. Of course I wanted a picture of the Ghost Leopard. Maybe I could find a camera for sale in one of the bazaars. Maybe I could get a shot of it and win the contest and be famous as the first person to ever take the Ghost Leopard’s picture. But the thing was, I also wanted to get back to the hotel before we got caught. Plus there was all that protecting the Leopard stuff that Mukta guy had been going on about last night. I felt totally confused and more than a little motion sick. A ray of sunlight flickered through the bus.

“I need air,” I said.

Zak jammed open his dirty blackened window and stuck his head outside. A light breeze finally blew through the bus. I closed my eyes and gulped it down. But when I turned my head to Zak to thank him, all I saw was a pair of mud-caked sneakers standing in the window frame, dirty shoelaces dangling. Then, the shoes disappeared as well. I was shoved over in the seat as a man carrying a squealing piglet pushed the woman with the goat on her lap closer to me at the window.
 

“Zak?” I said to nobody in particular.

“Zoe.”

I heard my muffled name called out, but didn’t know where it had come from. I couldn’t see Zak anywhere. He had disappeared. I turned my head to the back of the bus trying to find him.

“Over here.”

I whirled around. There was nobody at my window. I looked around through the crowd. Still no Zak. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the
 
blackened window on the opposite side of the bus edge open a little farther. I craned my neck and saw Zak's head appear, hanging upside down outside of it. His scraggly blonde hair blew in the breeze. Zak dropped his arm and took a bite out of a slice of watermelon. Watermelon? Where did he get that?

“Come on up,” Zak said.

I hesitated. The bus was overfilled and smelly. But was wherever Zak was riding any better? The watermelon said yes. Against my better judgment, I decided it couldn’t be any worse and I slid closer to the window. I put my head out first and saw a rock wall approaching. The bus was only inches away from it as we rounded the corner. I quickly pulled my head back in, but once the bus was back on a straight-away, I decided to try again. I knew my mother would kill me, but I let it go. My mother wasn’t there. Besides, I bet the diseases that could get me inside the bus were way worse than anything I could catch outside.

I carefully put my head outside the window for a second time. So far so good. There were no rock walls and no oncoming traffic. I pulled my feet up onto the seat and pushed myself a little farther out. Above me, on the roof of the bus, I saw the painted metal roof rack. I used one hand to hold the frame of the window and grasped at the roof rack with my other hand. But I wasn’t far enough out of the bus yet and couldn’t quite reach the rack. Zak poked his head down at me from the roof.

“It’s easy. Just grab on.”

I pushed myself a little farther out the window and was able to just touch the roof rack with the tips of my fingers. I pushed myself out just a bit more, my left hand still securely grabbing the window frame, and clamped onto the roof rack with my right hand. Now I had a solid grip. I decided to go for it and slid my whole body out, grabbing the roof rack with both hands and pulling my feet out onto the window frame. I looked ahead and saw that the bus was approaching a high trestle bridge. Did I mention that I’ve always hated heights? Heights make me feel sick to my stomach and more than a little dizzy. I figured I might even have that dizziness disease, the one my mom calls vertigo, but it didn’t matter now. I had come too far to quit.

 
Zak patted the roof above as I pulled myself up. I used my legs to push up from the window frame, but it was hard going. I didn’t know if I had the strength to pull myself up all the way, but I didn’t really want Zak to help me either. The bus twisted onto the bridge.
 

“Don’t look down,” Zak said.

Hanging there, my whole body dangling over the side of the bus, of course I looked. I almost swallowed my tongue. The bridge was so narrow that there was no rail, no lip, nothing but air for thousands of feet below me. The vertigo hit me like a bag of bricks. I felt myself getting dizzy, blackness pushing in around the corners of my vision. But I also felt Zak clamp a reassuring grip on my forearm from the roof above. Despite all of
 
our differences, I was really happy to have Zak there, right then. If a friend was a person who helped haul you onto the roof of a speeding bus, I guess Zak was a friend. I grit my teeth and pulled, doing my part to wrench myself up onto the roof. The hard metal roof rack rubbed under my belly as I rolled over it and sprawled beside Zak. The blackness hovering around the corners of my vision went away and the dizziness slowed as I caught my breath.

“Thanks for the hand,” I said.

It was beautiful up there, sacks of fruit and watermelon, and a few other passengers riding the arched rooftop. I sat up and Zak handed me a slice of bright red watermelon. I didn’t ask him who had given it to him or think of a single snarky comment. For the moment, I was happy just to be alive. We were high up in the hills, that was for sure, but the height didn’t bother me as long as I didn’t look directly down. As the bus twisted back and forth through the hills, a firm hand on the roof rack kept me more or less in place. Even the weather seemed to be cooperating. The sky had cleared since we’d gotten up that morning. But that wasn’t the best part. The best part was that as the sun rose above us, we were confronted by an awesome sight. The snow-capped Himalayas, the highest, most rugged mountains on Earth, peeked out at us from behind the clouds. They were huge and majestic and totally mind blowing, like nothing I had ever seen. On the rooftop like that, fresh breeze blowing, nothing above us but the sun, nothing below us but the green valleys, for about a second I forgot all about my problems and felt truly alive. More alive than I had ever felt in my whole life so far.

“Tell me this isn’t awesome,” Zak said.

 
I didn’t answer him, and I don’t think he expected me to. Sometimes Zak could be cool like that. Then he reached into his plastic bag, and pulled out my camera. He must have remembered it when we’d left the hut. I couldn’t help but smile. I hadn’t lost my camera after all. I’m pretty sure I was as happy as I had ever been at that moment and I didn’t care who knew it. Zak, the one guy who did everything wrong, had finally done something right. And he was right about another thing too. It was awesome. Riding the roof of the bus in the Himalayas like that was the most awesome feeling in the world.

The roof of the bus was exactly like a big sun deck in the sky, the huge snow-capped mountains rising off in the distance above us. There were a few other people up on top, mostly farmers I thought, judging by the sacks of fruit laying around everywhere, but not so many people that it was crowded. Zak and I lay on our backs in the middle of the roof, soaking in the sun. There were huge birds with wing spans wider than the bus circling above. I was pretty sure that the birds with their white and brown wings were Himalayan griffons. Not the mythological kind of griffon with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle and all that, but giant birds of prey that lived high in these mountains. The griffons looked big enough to pick the people off the roof with their gleaming yellow talons and tear us apart with their sharp beaks. So far they hadn’t done it, but you never knew. I snapped pictures of the giant birds as they swooped down, their white underbellies reflecting the bright sunlight.
 

At one point I thought I saw something else flying up there. It was kind of crazy. At first it looked like a flying carpet, as in magic-carpet-ride style. It swooped down low, then banked to the side. I could have sworn that crazy Mukta was flying it. I saw it for only a second and snapped a shot, but when I tried to get another shot, the carpet was gone and all I saw was bright sunlight. The really weird thing though, was that when I tried to look at the picture on the camera, all I saw was a blurry shadow. And I had the shot, I was sure of it. I had heard the shutter click. I thought I had to be imagining things so I went back to photographing the giant griffons swooping down low. Whatever I was taking photos of, I knew it was a numbers game. I'd have to take a lot of pictures to get one good enough to win the contest.
 

It felt good to bask in the warm sun after the mud and rain from the night before. We had to hold on tight when we went around corners, but it wasn’t too bad because we were wedged between the burlap sacks of fruit. There were apricots and watermelon, of course, and apples and dates, and all the farmers seemed willing to share. A burlap sack at my back provided a nice back support, kind of like a super couch in the sky. Everything moved when we took a corner, but fortunately the roof rack, which extended around the whole roof, basically kept things in place. From his position on his back, Zak threw apricots in the air, trying to catch them in his mouth. The ride was so twisty, I hadn’t seen him get one in his mouth yet, but every time he lost an apricot it seemed like the huge Himalayan mountains got just a little closer.

“You might want to leave some fruit,” I said.

“It belongs to the farmer up front there. He said we could have some.”