Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  They dashed up the road, then across it, and ducked into the church. No roof, just two incomplete walls. The bright sunlight spilled across the unfinished altar, the sawdust-covered floor. Construction on the church had stopped back in January, in the early days of the brujo incursions, when the carpenters had been seized by young, naïve ghosts who just couldn’t wait to try out the newfound powers that Dominica, queen of the brujos, had described to them. The carpenters, of course, had short-circuited almost instantly, three of them bleeding out, the rest still wandering around in the tribe, their minds and spirits broken.

  She felt the church was the wrong place to hide. “Sam, we need to keep moving.”

  “Whit won’t come in here. Some preacher tried to convert him before they electrocuted him, and as he died, he vowed he would never set foot inside a church ever again. He brought that into death with him. He brought that fear with him when he died.”

  Undoubtedly true. Dominica had issues like that, too, but she had died so long ago she could barely recall them. Whit had been dead for just six months, so the stuff he had brought into death with him was fresher, raw. Still, Maddie didn’t want to stay here. “Let’s head into those trees.” She pointed west, where there was no wall, just tremendous oaks and pines and homes barely visible through the branches. “It’s an older neighborhood. We can hide in one of those houses.”

  Sam backed into an unfinished confessional. “I’m staying right here.” His face came undone, and he began to cry. “I … I need to confess, to…”

  Great, Sam Dorset, ex-Catholic. Maddie hurried over to him. “Sam, listen to me. You’re not responsible for what Whit made you do, okay? You weren’t doing those things. Whit was. You have nothing to confess.”

  He covered his face with his hands, his body shaking with silent sobs. “I’m … staying here.”

  “Fuck that.” She grabbed his hand and yanked him to his feet so fast that he stumbled in confusion. “You’re leaving with me.”

  “We can’t go out there.” He screamed the words, wrenched his arm free. He backed toward the confessional with short, uncertain steps and kept his fisted hands out in front of him, as if he intended to punch her if she moved toward him. “They’ll find us, track us down, bleed us out.” His expression was that of a man so traumatized by brujo possession that rational thought had deserted him.

  “Jesus, Sam,” she whispered. “Okay. Okay. Take care of yourself.”

  Maddie turned and trotted west across the church, toward those towering oaks that beckoned, toward that older neighborhood in which she might hide until she could figure out what to do. In her grandmother’s old neighborhood in Key Largo, the trees had been palms, Norwegian pines, gumbo-limbos with their thick trunks, their reddish bark. She felt a pang of nostalgia for that place, for the life she’d had before her aunt Tesso had come out of her coma, before she’d known anything about hungry ghosts.

  She dodged blocks of concrete, stacks of bricks, piles of wood. She lingered briefly at the edge of the trees, hoping Sam would change his mind and join her, and glanced back. He was still sitting in the unfinished confessional, head in his hands.

  “Sam,” she called. “I wish you’d reconsider.”

  He raised his head, gazed at her for a moment, then suddenly shot to his feet, hands flying to his throat, and shrieked, “Run, Maddie, they found me, run, run for all of us.” He started to choke, she could hear it, his desperate, dying gasps for breath.

  She tore away from him, from the church, and plunged into the trees, stumbling, terrified she would be next.

  Her head ached from hunger, her stomach growled constantly, her bladder was filled to bursting. But she didn’t dare stop. She raced across two yards, ripped through an empty house, clambered over a rusted fence, and dropped into another thicket.

  She doubled over, gasping for breath. Move, just move, anywhere, fast. But move where?

  When she reached out to Sanchez, to her grandfather, to Sanchez’s mother, she couldn’t find any of them. Maddie suspected that Dominica had provided the connection, that she was the switchboard, the engine that made telepathic contact possible. You’re on your own. Nothing new there.

  She ran through the woods, arms tucked in at her sides, ran because she didn’t know what else to do. When she finally slowed to catch her breath, she found herself on a twisting dirt road along the salt marsh. Homes with metal roofs rose on wood or concrete pilings on either side of her, all of them apparently deserted. No cars, no people, no dogs, not even a stray cat.

  Maddie ducked under one of the houses on the marsh side of the road, relieved her aching bladder near some bushes, then crept up the stairs to the front door.

  Locked. Shit. She removed the screen of the closest window and kicked the glass. Fissures spread through it, tributaries to nowhere. She kicked it again, the glass shattered, and she crawled inside.

  Maddie hurried to the sink, spun the faucet, and drank straight from it, sating her terrible thirst. She threw open the pantry door, looking for anything edible the brujos might have missed. Packets of trail mix, a can of tuna, a few bottles of water, that was it. She popped open the tuna and scooped it out with her fingers, shoving it into her mouth as she stood there in the middle of the kitchen, looking around.

  Stuff lay everywhere—clothing, broken dishes and cups, paintings and photos that had been torn off the walls. The couch and its cushions looked as if a madman had gone after them with a butcher knife. The rocking chair’s legs had been chopped off and tossed in the fireplace. This was what brujos on a rampage did when they pillaged for food and supplies, senseless destruction that made them feel like gods. Her eyes fixed on the sliding glass doors on the other side of the living room and the wide porch beyond it that offered a stunning view of the marsh.

  No boats out there. Maddie crossed the room, opened the porch doors, stepped out and walked right to the end of it, where she had a view of the road. Empty, empty, empty. Violent shudders tore through her, and the empty can of tuna clattered to the floor. She sank into the nearest chair, gripped her knees, the armrests, her knees again. A sob escaped her and she pressed the back of her hand against her mouth to silence it.

  No self-pity allowed. If Dominica found her this time, if she seized her again, she would kill her. Kill her. Bleed her out. Maddie thought of what the fog had done to Fritz Small and his wife, how it had covered them, consumed them. She thought of poor Sam in the confessional. Run, Maddie, run for all of us. Dominica ruled through fear. Maddie knew if she succumbed to fear now, then she deserved to be seized again.

  She moved swiftly to the other end of the porch, where she had a different view of the road, then went inside the house again, desperate for a plan, a strategy, something. She made her way to the master bedroom, picked up the phone. Dead. A computer monitor rested on the desk, but she didn’t see any computer, keyboard, or mouse. Maybe the owners of this place had fled early on and taken the computer with them.

  Maddie jerked open the closet door and rifled through the clothes, looking for something that might fit her. She found a shirt, jeans, a heavy jacket, good hiking shoes that probably would fit her. In the bureau, she helped herself to clean underwear, a pair of socks. Shower. Her body screamed for a shower to get rid of Whit’s stink, Dominica’s stink, the stink of her imprisonment for all these months.

  She didn’t find any towels on the racks in the bathroom and the linen closet was bare. She returned to the bedroom to look in the closet again. She found towels on an upper shelf, helped herself to one, and several washcloths fluttered to the floor. When she stooped over to pick them up, she saw boxes from the Apple store pushed back against the wall, partially covered by slacks and jeans and a bathrobe that hung on hangers. Maddie quickly pulled the boxes out, and there, on top of one of them, with a big red ribbon pressed to the top, was a MacBook.

  Someone’s present. Excited, she brought it out and carried it over to the desk. Please work, please let there be wireless. Lid open, power on
, laptop booting … The computer had been set up already for whoever was supposed to get it, a time-saver for her. She clicked on the icon for the AirPort in the upper corner—but not a single wireless network was indicated. So much for that great idea, she thought, and decided to shower first and then move the laptop to various parts of the house in the hopes of picking up a network from one of the other houses in the neighborhood.

  In the bathroom, she set the clean clothes on the back of the toilet, turned on the shower, spun the faucet to maximum hot, stripped off her soiled clothes. For a long time, she just stood under the hot spray, the needles drilling into her skull, her skin, and refused to think too far into the future or too far into the past. She placed a time limit on the future and the past: sixty seconds. She could handle a minute on either side of the present.

  Dirt and grime swirled down the drain and she told herself it represented her defilement, the horror of her imprisonment, spinning down the drain, away. She needed symbols now, something mythic and powerful to snap her fully back into herself.

  She felt marginally better when her clean bare feet pressed against the fluffy bath mat, when she pulled on her clean clothes and socks and slipped her feet into shoes that held no memory of Dominica. Maddie ran a brush through her hair, marveling at how silken it felt, how the strands squeaked between her fingers. It felt magnificent to be clean again.

  She scooped up her old clothes from the floor, picked up the laptop, and went into the kitchen. Here, she dumped her soiled clothes in the trash, set the laptop on the counter, tore open a packet of trail mix and munched on it as she clicked on the wireless icon again. Not a damn thing in range. As she picked up the laptop to move it, she felt a protrusion in the side—a spot for an Internet card. So where the hell was the card?

  Excited again, Maddie returned to the bedroom closet and checked inside each of the Apple boxes. At the bottom of the second box was a small container with the Internet card inside. Maddie tore it open and raced back into the kitchen. She inserted the card in the slot, clicked the icon, and just that fast, she was online.

  She quickly navigated to Gypsy woman’s blog, the spot where Dominica usually began and ended her day. Gypsy’s poetry about forbidden love, lust, and passion spoke to that part of Dominica that craved someone to love and loved the one she was with. She even commented on the blog as Nica.

  Maddie studied Gypsy’s photograph, a stunning woman in her early sixties with wide, dark eyes, her hair a wild mass of curls, rings adorning her fingers, bracelets climbing her arms. She looked like a gypsy. A risk, she thought, but what the hell. Undermine Dominica from several fronts. She clicked on the e-mail link and wrote:

  My name is Maddie Livingston. Please read this—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/esperanza—so you’ll understand what I’m about to tell you.

  On your sitemeter, you’ll find an IP that appears several times a day. Location: Cedar Key, an island on Florida’s gulf coast now under quarantine. The woman from that IP comments as Nica.

  If you read the Wiki article link, then you know a battle was fought against brujos last summer. My aunt Tess, tessl@gmail.com, was instrumental in that battle, which now continues on Cedar Key. The leader of the brujos—Nica—has formed a new tribe and they have seized nearly everyone on the island. I know how nuts this sounds. E-mail Tess for verification. She’s an ex-FBI agent.

  Could you please post this poem I’ve attached? It might stop this bitch in her tracks.

  The poem was simple and awkward; a poet she was not. But Dominica would get the message. Maddie signed it, Wayra.

  Then she sat there, thinking. Dominica knew her various e-mail addresses, her Twitter and Facebook passwords, her contacts. But as far as Maddie knew, Dominica had never rifled around too deeply in her computer knowledge. So unless she’d learned to hack into computers while Maddie slept, she probably didn’t know the hotmail addresses for Tesso and Wayra. But she might be able to bring up that information, so Maddie created a new Gmail address and wrote both of them through those accounts. She figured Tesso would get the message first. She checked her e-mail whenever something popped up in her in-box. Wayra rarely checked his. But just in case he was ahead of the curve, she thought, he would know the score. She instructed both of them not to reply.

  She deleted her current Twitter and Facebook accounts, then created new ones and sent a duplicate of her Gmail message to Tess’s and Wayra’s Facebook pages, then shorter messages to them both through Twitter. She powered down the laptop and slipped it inside the pack to take with her.

  Once again, she moved restlessly around the house, checking that the doors—front and balcony—were locked, but that was stupid, of course, since the window was shattered and locked doors and sealed windows never kept out a brujo. She needed a weapon—fire would be best, preferably a flamethrower, but a gun would do nicely, too.

  She checked under the kitchen sink for lighter fluid, matches, old rags, and found all three. Now, a broomstick. In the kitchen pantry, she helped herself to something better than a wooden broomstick—a metal mop stick longer than any broom equivalent. She quickly wrapped rags around it and set her new weapon near the door to take with her when she left.

  A careful search of the rooms uncovered nothing useful. In the hallway, though, she discovered a padlocked door—a storage area, a closet, a place where the owner undoubtedly stashed all valuable belongings that renters might steal.

  She needed a hammer.

  In the kitchen, Maddie rifled through every drawer and cabinet until she found a toolbox that held a large, heavy hammer. This would do. It took three hard blows to the padlock before the sucker popped open. She scoured the boxes, the cardboard containers, the neatly arranged suitcases of stuff. She found a small cardboard box that held a few canned goods and packages of ramen noodles. She set that aside, then unzipped one of the suitcases and tore through the contents. She removed a sweater that looked like it would fit her, stuffed it into an empty backpack. Maddie unzipped yet another suitcase, flipped open the top.

  “Bingo,” she whispered.

  All sorts of hunting and fishing knives were arranged neatly inside. From a side pocket, she withdrew an X26 Taser and charger that led her to believe the owner of the house was or had been in law enforcement. She selected a knife with a serrated edge, plugged the Taser into the wall, and set her backpack on the kitchen counter.

  She moved out onto the balcony again. Road still empty. The two closest houses, both across the street from her, were definitely deserted. No vehicles were parked in front of either of them. She didn’t recall seeing a car or cart parked under this house, either, but had noticed a storage shed that might hold a bike. Even a bike would be preferable to leaving here on foot. She didn’t have any idea where she would go yet, but the dense woods to the north of the house looked promising. The trick was to keep moving, to make herself less accessible to Dominica, to find holdouts. The last she knew, Sanchez was with Zee Small’s group, but where? And was he still with them? Or had all of them been seized?

  If they had all been seized, then …

  No, don’t go there, don’t think it, don’t drop it into possible scenarios.

  Maddie added a bottle of water to her pack, shrugged it on, then unplugged the Taser from the wall. She zipped the charger into an inner compartment and slipped the Taser into a pocket of a jacket she’d taken from the closet. She checked the road again, gazed out over the salt marsh, looking for boats. Nothing.

  On her way out the door, she swept the hammer off the counter, doused her torch with lighter fluid, and flew down the front steps, into the light, the songs of birds, the emptiness of this tiny neighborhood.

  She ducked under the house, where the storage shed was. No padlock on this door. But the shed was rusted and old, and when she slammed the hammer’s prongs into the metal around the lock, she tore a hole in it. She struck it again with the prongs, pulled. The lock mechanism popped out, and the door swung open. The shed held a lawn mower, garden
ing tools, two dusty baseball caps, several lamps, a trunk, two bikes with flat tires, and a tire pump. She gathered her hair up, pulled on one of the dusty caps. Hiding her hair might buy her a few more moments.

  Then she pushed the bike out, set it against one of the pilings and proceeded to pump up the tires.

  As she inflated the last tire, the birds suddenly went silent and Maddie glanced around uneasily, looking for the reason. There, coming up the road toward her: a cart with two men inside. She didn’t recognize them, but why should she? Since Dominica had plunged Maddie into the deep sleep yesterday the tribe probably had seized another fifty or a hundred hosts.

  Had they seen her? If so, it wasn’t as if she could pretend to act like Dominica. Brujos always knew when a human hosted one of their own. She might escape them on the bike. But if they were accompanied by a brujo in its natural form, she wouldn’t get far. Even if the men were alone, her location would be broadcast through the brujo net as soon as they saw her and Dominica would seize her again.

  She grabbed her torch, darted to the far side of the shed, her back to a hedge, her stomach twisted with fear. Their laughter rang out as they neared the house and she suddenly wished she had stayed inside or tried to escape them on the bike.

  Coward, whispered that soft, inner voice.

  She dug the Taser from her jacket pocket, lit her torch, leaped onto the bike, and pedaled wildly toward them, shouting, “Hey, brujo fuckers!”

  The two men seemed startled to see her, a madwoman racing out from under a house, waving a flaming mop stick. They were either stupid or arrogant or both and simply stopped their cart and leaped out and one of them yelled, “Dominica wants you back, bitch.”

  They apparently believed their presence and shouts would reduce her to a blubbering state in which they could easily capture her and drag her back to Dominica, to the hotel. She kept barreling toward them, one man a middle-aged Humpty Dumpty, the other string-bean thin, around her age. They kept hollering and waving their arms and moving toward her.