Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

Under her command.

  As Whit brought the truck under the branches of the oak, the fog wrapped around its tires and began to rise toward the terrified couple. Diane wept noisily and kept trying to move closer to her husband. Fritz struggled valiantly to free his hands and feet, but only succeeded in losing his balance and toppled into his wife. They both fell to the floor of the truck.

  The truck stopped and Whit and Gogh hopped out, climbed into the bed, and hauled the hostages to their feet. Just then, Jill barreled out of the side door of the hotel, waving two lengths of rope, and the crowd cheered and chanted again. The defiance Jill had displayed in the market was now gone, subsumed by the power of the collective. There was yet hope for Jill.

  As Whit and Gogh held the two steady, Dominica fashioned a pair of nooses and leaped into the bed of the truck.

  “You first,” she said to Fritz, and fitted the noose around his neck as he screamed and squirmed and sobbed. She hoped that when he died, he went elsewhere. She didn’t want him in her tribe. Over the centuries, she’d had too many screamers like him, complainers, ghosts who found fault with everything. When the rope was fastened securely around Fritz’s neck, she ran her knuckles over Diane’s soft cheek. “Such a pretty little thing.”

  The fog rolled closer, and the brujo litany whispered through the darkness. Find the body, fuel the body …

  “Perhaps you both will join us when you pass,” Dominica said. “It happens, you know. The transitional soul finds comfort in a tribe.” She glanced at Fritz. “Although I have to say that I like Diane better than I like you, Fritz.”

  Diane’s eyes bulged in their sockets, and Fritz screamed, “Don’t touch her; get your fucking hands off her!”

  “Now, now, Fritz, we brujos know how to share and that’s something you’ll learn if you choose to join us. The—”

  Just then, Maddie’s grandfather took shape beside Dominica. Charlie Livingston in his trademark white clothing, his Ben Franklin specs riding low on the bridge of his nose, a fat Cuban cigar tucked behind his ear. He looked as solid as every host in the courtyard, and although Dominica couldn’t tell if the others could see him, Maddie did. She reacted immediately, fighting Dominica for control of her own body. But Dominica’s control couldn’t be broken, not right now, not with the collective madness of the tribe fueling her.

  “This little charade has gone far enough, Dominica,” Charlie announced.

  “Get lost, Charlie. You don’t have any control over physical life.” Then she shouted, “Whit, start the truck and pull forward!”

  “Hang them, hang them, hang them,” the crowd shouted.

  As the engine revved, another chaser appeared next to Charlie, a male Dominica had never seen before. Oriental eyes, bald as a turnip, wearing jeans, a pullover sweater, sneakers. The two of them sank through the hood of the truck, and the engine sputtered and died.

  Whit kept turning the key, the starter whined and scraped, but the engine refused to turn over. Gogh leaped out of the truck and snapped open the hood. The chanting grew louder and louder, the fog thickened and swelled.

  Fritz and Diane went mute with terror, the nooses around their necks already so tight that it wouldn’t take much more pressure to strangle them.

  Charlie materialized beside her again. “Release them, Dominica.”

  “You stupid asshole,” Dominica spat, and turned to the fog. “Seize them! Bleed them out!”

  The fog swept in, covering the truck, curling around the hostages’ bodies, climbing into the branches. Shrieks of agony echoed across the courtyard and the brujo litany reached a crescendo, an orchestra of the damned. Then it was over.

  The fog backed off so that all the others could see the hostages’ bloody, lifeless bodies swinging from the nooses. The woman’s neck slipped free and she dropped to the bed of the truck, into a pool of blood. “Whit, cut down Fritz. Then we’ll need a couple of you to remove the bodies and wrap them in sheets. The back of the truck should be hosed out and the covered bodies placed back inside. We have a delivery to make.”

  Charlie looked livid and it made her smile. “We’re winning, Charlie. Take that back to your chaser buddies in Esperanza.”

  “You’ve only won this round. The next round begins now.” The air suddenly filled with cries and caws and the frenzied flapping of wings. A murder of crows descended on the courtyard, hundreds of them, maybe thousands, crows that were unnaturally large, mythic in size, their wingspans thirty, forty, fifty feet across, she couldn’t tell for sure.

  A tremendous white crow, twice the size of the others, swept in low over the courtyard. The flapping of its immense wings whipped up dust and dried leaves, creating dozens of miniature tornadoes that spun through the courtyard, tearing apart the potted plants, stripping branches bare, dispersing the fog. Now the other crows followed and the crowd scrambled for cover as the giant birds dived at them, cawing, snapping their dagger-sharp beaks.

  Dominica jumped down from the truck, waving her arms to protect herself from being ripped apart, and shouted, “Get inside the hotel!”

  Panicked, the crowd shoved through the side door, pushing at each other to get inside. As the crows dived at the stragglers, crying shrilly, brujos vacated their hosts and the liberated humans exploded through the courtyard gate, escaping into the streets of Cedar Key. Dominica realized the crows weren’t hurting the living; it was just a ploy to scare the brujos from their hosts.

  Dominica, already inside the hotel, threw open one of the windows and yelled, “The crows won’t hurt you! They’re just trying to force you out of your hosts.”

  The white crow dived toward her and soared through the window, its impossibly long wings cutting right through the wooden frame and the walls as though both were made of water. Dominica lurched back, stumbled into the piano bench, and fell into the screaming crowd behind her. As the crowd scattered, Dominica slammed to the floor and the white crow aimed straight at her.

  She scrambled back on her hands and knees, struggling to rise, but the crow kept diving at her, its flapping wings and dagger beak just inches from her body, eyes, hands. Other crows flew into the lobby, cawing, diving at the fleeing hosts until the terrified brujos vacated the bodies. Most of the liberated humans raced out the front door. A few, whose minds and spirits had broken irrevocably, stumbled around, alternately doubling over and moaning, then snapping upward and screeching.

  The flock split in two and one part went after the luminous orbs and puffs of discolored smoke, the brujos in their natural forms. The giant birds slammed into them, snapped them into smaller pieces, clawed them to nothingness. Dominica heard their desperate, agonized wails as they were obliterated. But brujos couldn’t be annihilated like this. It wasn’t possible, it had never happened before. These crows were some chaser illusion, and illusions couldn’t cause destruction.

  Her feet found purchase and she vaulted upward just as the white crow swept toward her again. She flung out her arms. “You’re not real, you can’t hurt me.” But the crow’s beak grazed her right forearm, tearing open the skin, and Dominica dived behind the front desk to escape another attack.

  All around her, those caws and cries echoed, and her brujos wailed as they were torn apart. Glass shattered, objects clanged and clattered and crashed, piano cords twanged. The birds were wrecking the lobby, dining room, bar, the kitchen. Then, between one breath and the next, a horrendous rushing sound sucked everything out of the air—oxygen, sound, even color, so that she saw the world only through her bruja eyes, black and white and shades of gray. Just as abruptly as it had started, it ended. Silence choked the air.

  After a few minutes, Dominica grabbed onto the edge of the front desk and pulled herself upright. She glanced around slowly, taking in the unbelievable devastation. The lobby looked as if it had been turned upside down and shaken like a snow globe. Shards of glass and plates and bowls littered the surface of the front desk, the floor, the stairs. The piano bench lay on its side and had more holes in it than a sponge. The
piano had collapsed, one of its thick legs sliced in two, and dozens of piano keys littered the floor. The wall mirror had shattered, the glass in the front door was gone, the screen flapped like a loose tongue.

  Dominica moved unsteadily away from the front desk, barely aware that her arm was bleeding from where the white crow had grazed her. Shock kept shuddering through her, one wave after another. The door to the dining room had been torn off its hinges and the doorway was filled with debris—splintered chairs, more glass, silverware, pieces of dishes, lengths of torn tablecloths. Four of the broken humans, tourists, wandered around the lobby, shuffling through the broken glass, arms clutched to their chests. One of them, a woman, shuffled right out the side door and into the courtyard, and promptly fell to her knees, wailing inconsolably.

  Brujos began to crawl from their hiding places, eyes wide with shock, faces pale. Whit ran through the front door and came straight over to her. “What the hell were those things?”

  “Conjured by the chasers. Beyond that, I’m not sure.” But she clearly understood their intent was to diminish the size of her tribe—either by infusing the brujos with such fear that it drove them from their hosts or by annihilating them, or both. “How many did we lose? Any idea?”

  “I think between twenty-five and forty ghosts.”

  “And just that many hosts.”

  It could have been worse. The crows could have picked off her entire tribe. In fact, given another chance, they probably would do exactly that. She refused to give them another chance. “We’re speeding up our schedule, Whit. In the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I want everyone in town seized, even people under the age of sixteen. Every member of our tribe should have a host. And no more hostages. From now on, every one of us with a host travels with a brujo in natural form so that when we encounter an uncompromised human, a brujo can seize that person. Now let’s get a cleaning crew together and figure out what to do with the broken humans.” She tilted her head toward the tourists wandering aimlessly around the lobby. “Then you and I have a delivery to make.”

  “I do think, Nica, that it might be time for you to bleed out Maddie and find a new host. We all saw that guy in white, the chaser, and his buddy. The net is humming with debate about whether your host has become a distinct liability.”

  “I’ll make that call. If and when the time comes.”

  “But—”

  “Look, Whit. I appreciate your feedback, your expertise, everything you do. But when it comes to my host, her fate resides with me and only me.”

  Fifteen

  When Kate came to, she was on the cot against the wall, covered with a light blanket, a pillow under her head, her shoes side by side on the floor. She had no idea how long she had been in this room, on this cot, where it was, or how she’d gotten here. The last thing she remembered was being shot in the back with a tranquilizer dart by someone on the airboat. She knew that food had arrived twice, delivered by a man with a blurred face, and that she’d shoveled the food into her mouth and had fallen back against the cot again, unable to remain conscious.

  But she was conscious now and slowly took stock of her surroundings. Small room, maybe twelve feet square. No windows. A nightstand bolted to the floor. It had a lamp on it, the light dim. An adjoining bath. She remembered stumbling into that bathroom at some point to relieve her bladder. She remembered a toothbrush, toothpaste, soap, a clean towel and washcloth, and remembered that she had showered. Beyond that, her memory yielded nothing at all about this place.

  Kate sat up and swung her legs over the side of the cot. She noticed a table pushed up against the far wall, a chair at either end of it. On the table were a yellow legal pad and a pencil with a blunt tip. The walls were completely bare and the room lacked a radio, TV, magazines, books, everything that might anchor her in time. So she stood on legs that felt shaky and unstable and began to walk around the room.

  When she walked like this, she entered into a kind of meditative state, and remembered that shortly after she had returned to Cedar Key, she had taken up meditation for the second time in her life. The course had been held at the library, taught by a bald man with beautiful eyes and a winning smile. One of the ways he had broken up the meditations was by walking through a garden outside the library, a sort of labyrinth of hedges and flowers.

  Every week for eight weeks, it seemed she had walked farther and farther back into her own life, unraveling her relationship with Rocky’s father, with her own parents, her childhood, her love for the island. Now she walked to unravel what had been happening on Cedar Key. As she unraveled that night in the hotel bar when Bean and Marion went at it, the door opened and two men walked in.

  A short white man, a very tall black man. Shorty wore an FBI badge around his neck that identified him as Tom O’Donnell; the other guy wore a badge for ISIS, an organization Kate had never heard of, that identified him as Bob Delaney. They introduced themselves, O’Donnell pulled out a chair and gestured toward it. “Have a seat, Ms. Davis.”

  “I’m fine right where I am.” She stood with her back to the wall. “Where the hell am I?”

  “Outside of the quarantine area,” O’Donnell said.

  “Which tells me squat. Have I been charged with something?”

  “We’d just like to ask you some questions.”

  “Hey, look, someone shot me with a tranquilizer dart. I deserve some answers before I answer any of your questions.”

  “The dart was unfortunate,” O’Donnell said.

  “Unfortunate?” Kate balked. “I could’ve drowned. It was a goddamn assault.”

  “You were in violation of the quarantine. They had their orders. And just so you know, we drew blood and you’re free of the virus.”

  “You drew my fucking blood? What gives you the right to do that?”

  “The quarantine,” O’Donnell replied, and brought out an iPad, turned it on, set it in front of her. “We’d like to know about the incidents at Annie’s Café, Ms. Davis.”

  Kate stared at a thirty-second video that covered everything from the moment Mayor Pete Stanton had grabbed the back of her shirt to when he had shouted, “Seize them, seize all of them” to when she’d held the second torch and begun setting everything on fire. The video wasn’t the greatest; she guessed it had been taken with a cell. But it clearly showed her as the one who had started the fire. Guilty as charged.

  “What would you like to know?” Kate asked.

  “Why did you set fire to everything?”

  “Didn’t you hear what the mayor yelled? ‘Seize them all.’ What do you think he was referring to, Agent O’Donnell?”

  “I honestly don’t know. We were hoping you might enlighten us.”

  Shit. O’Donnell didn’t strike her as the type who would believe anything she said. But she wasn’t in the mood for lying. Kate walked over to the table and leaned in so close to O’Donnell she could smell the mint he sucked on. “Some people refer to them as demons. I don’t believe in demons, so I think of them as evil ghosts. If you don’t believe in demons or ghosts, then I suppose you can call them bad fucking karma, Agent O’Donnell. They crave all the sensory pleasures of physical life, so they seize the living for that purpose. That’s what they’ve been doing on Cedar Key. One of them is in the mayor. In fact, all the people seated on the right side of the room in that video were hosts to these abominations. Fire annihilates them.”

  O’Donnell just stared at her, sucking harder on his mint. “Excuse me, but if ghosts are already dead, how can fire annihilate them? Where’d they come from? You’ll have to be more specific, Ms. Davis.”

  More specific? Really? “Well, it’s like this, Agent O’Donnell,” and she started talking.

  She went through the events in February, talked about the changes in Bean, Rich, others in town whom she had known for years. She didn’t mention the shapeshifter, but told them about Zee Small’s theories. And when she finished, O’Donnell pulled out the other chair and sank into it. Delaney remained stan
ding, but the two of them exchanged a glance that probably didn’t bode well for her immediate future.

  “Look, I don’t know how long you’ve kept me here, but my son disappeared the night of the fire at the café and I need to look for him. So please hurry up and decide whatever you need to decide.” She looked over at Delaney. “You don’t say anything. Why not?”

  O’Donnell leaped in. “He’s not here in any official—”

  “Cut the crap, Tom.” Delaney’s response was quick, sharp. “She deserves an honest answer.”

  The man’s eyes were the same rich, dark chocolate color of his skin. His intense gaze unnerved her. Kate felt as though he were strolling around inside of her, scrutinizing her soul, her psyche, the terrains of her heart. She looked down at the floor, away from him. “Honesty. Now there’s an honorable place for the government to start.” Then she raised her eyes and met Delaney’s gaze. “So what’s the honest answer?”

  “You’ll have a tough time convincing anyone in FEMA or Homeland Security or the CDC that ghosts are taking over the island. But at some level, many of them sense that an unknown virus has nothing to do with what’s going on here. And that’s why no one has gone into the quarantine area.”

  “Good thing. You’d be seized very quickly if you walked through downtown.”

  “We could call in ghostbusters.” O’Donnell snickered at his own joke.

  “Who took that video?” she asked. “How’d you get it? If there were security cameras inside Annie’s—which I seriously doubt, it’s just not that sophisticated a place—then they probably burned along with the building. That video looks like it came from a cell phone.”

  “It did,” O’Donnell replied, and glanced at Delaney. “An agent went rogue and entered Cedar Key against orders. He was at Annie’s the night it burned. But we also had another agent install security cameras at various spots on the island before the quarantine was imposed.”

  “So charge me or let me go, gentlemen. And if you’re going to charge me, I’d like to call my attorney.”