Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Love or lust, Nica? She could almost hear Wayra asking her this. The truth was that it didn’t matter. For her, they were one and the same.

  The four of them piled into the truck.

  * * *

  Maddie moved swiftly through the tunnel of crows, her head aching from the smells, the constant, throbbing whoop of the choppers, the proximity of the brujos, and the nearly crippling uncertainty of everything. Now and then, a giant feather drifted through the air, supernatural flotsam that reminded her this tunnel was not permanent, that it might break up and come apart at any moment. She moved faster, faster, Wayra and Illary right behind her, the others back by the plane, preparing it for takeoff.

  The radio she held crackled with voices from the chopper pilots. Delaney had thrust it into her hand as she’d left the plane and told her to keep it on.

  What’s with that dark blanket of birds? one pilot asked. We supposed to shoot birds?

  No, just people, another pilot replied. Never seen anything like this with birds, though. Spooky.

  Hold positions, said a third pilot.

  Then the tunnel of crows snaked to the right, the left, and began thinning, admitting expanding bands of light. The cawing started up again, louder, urgent, intermingled with shrieks and cries. Up and down the tunnel, greater gaps appeared as crows started flying away. The flapping of their tremendous wings whipped the air into a kind of tornadic frenzy filled with sand and sticks and even burning debris from the fires.

  Maddie pressed her arm across her forehead, trying to shield her eyes from the ash, and stumbled forward blindly. The wind bit at her arms and legs and cheeks. When she looked again, the crows were above them, still providing some cover, but many of them faded in and out against the lightening sky. Whatever magic this was, it couldn’t hold together much longer.

  Then the tunnel of crows simply ended and she gazed out across a gaping chasm in the marina parking lot. No crows, no fog, just early light and empty asphalt and a couple of black choppers hovering dangerously low. The hovering choppers seemed to be waiting for that gap to fill with people.

  “We need a shield,” Maddie said. “Otherwise the choppers are going to mow them down, Wayra.”

  “We’re the shield,” he said, and instantly shifted and strolled out into the chasm.

  A dog? Is that a dog? one pilot asked. I’m not shooting any damn dog. Forget it.

  The radio burst with static and half a dozen voices, all of them commenting on the dog and the hawk that appeared behind the dog, and what the hell was this mission about, anyway? Then an authoritative male voice boomed over the radio. Gentlemen, this is Agent O’Donnell. Your mission is to prevent that plane from taking off. Are we clear on that?

  Yes, sir. Could you, uh, advise about the mammoth crows?

  They aren’t real, O’Donnell snapped.

  Beg to differ, sir. They appear on radar. That makes them real.

  I repeat, O’Donnell said, your mission is to prevent that plane from taking off.

  Two of the choppers peeled away and Maddie dashed across the three hundred yards, her arms tucked in tightly at her sides, and zigzagged to make herself a more difficult target just in case these pilots decided to fire at her. But no one fired. She made it to the other side, where Kate, Zee, and six others waited. Maddie’s first thought was, How would the plane accommodate another eight people? Even with the seats and nonessential equipment removed, it seemed unlikely that the plane would be able to get off the ground with fourteen people on board. But those logistics belonged to Delaney; she couldn’t worry about them. If they had to, they could divide themselves into two groups and Delaney could fly them out separately to Gainesville.

  “Maddie,” Kate squealed, and threw her arms around her as though they were long-lost friends. Maybe they were.

  “Just run. Flat-out run,” Maddie said. “The plane is obscured by the fog and the crows. But I don’t think it’s going to last much longer.”

  “Will the plane be able to fit all of us?” Zee asked.

  Maddie’s eyes locked on the old man’s face. “I hope so.” Around them, the fog shifted, hugging them one moment, thinning the next. Maddie looked frantically around for Wayra and Illary, but they were gone. “Just go. Now. Fast.”

  And they did.

  Maddie watched them, making sure they made it to the other side, then threw out her arms and screamed, “Charlie, you and your chaser buddies brought us this far. Take us the rest of the way. You hear me?”

  Nothing changed. The chasm remained, a gaping hole through which sunlight poured, and she thought, What the hell, and started running.

  The two remaining choppers fired on her, bullets pinging to her right and left, forcing her to cut from one side to the other, again and again. And then she plunged into the fog, beneath the protection of the giant crows, and fell to her knees, her body heaving and shuddering, hands pressed to her face, her body rocking forward and back, forward and back.

  “C’mon, Red,” Sanchez shouted, and yanked her to her feet and pulled her along through the strange, dark tunnel.

  Maddie stumbled and lurched, the radio in her hand crackling with static, then voices. Nothing made sense, everything made sense, and making sense of any of it didn’t matter. She gripped Sanchez’s arm and they raced the last few hundred feet to the plane. She scrambled into the crowded cabin, he barreled in after her and slammed the cabin door. Then he yelled, “Get us out of here, Delaney!”

  * * *

  The fire on Second Street raged so fiercely that they were forced to take an alternate route, backtracking toward the bridge that crossed over to Dock Street. A helicopter was descending at the end of it, a dark forbidding object that looked as if it intended to land in the exact spot where the road curved.

  “Go faster,” Dominica shouted. “We can beat it and get past it before it lands.”

  Whit opened the truck’s V-6 engine up wide. The truck tore ahead at such an extreme speed that when a hawk and a tremendous white crow swept in front of the windshield, he lost control of the vehicle. It skidded past the entrance to the bridge on its left wheels, slammed into a concrete telephone pole, and plunged into the salt marsh.

  Dominica heard shrieking, a horrid, piercing sound, and realized it was coming from her, that she was struggling to unfasten her seat belt so she could pull Whit back into the car. His head was stuck in the broken windshield, jagged edges of glass had nearly severed his neck. His host was dead and he hadn’t escaped before the host had died.

  Her seat belt popped open and she struggled to climb out the open passenger window. But her right leg didn’t work the way it was supposed to. She was distracted by screams from the backseat, Jill or Joe or both of them, she couldn’t tell, didn’t care. High tide, it was hide tide and water poured into the truck and her right leg was useless, dead to her.

  She knew she should vacate her host now, immediately. But Lynn from Key West was all that was left to her. Without her, Dominica would be consciousness without substance again, her senses limited to shades of gray, muted sounds. Even pain was preferable to that prison.

  She dragged herself out the window and fell into the water facefirst, with a graceless splash. Her arms flailed, her useless leg weighted her down, she somehow managed to turn onto her back, and there was Wayra, the hawk riding on his shoulder, the shadow of the immense white crow falling over them.

  “Help me, Wayra,” she gasped, coughing up water, desperately trying to breathe.

  “With pleasure,” he said, and grasped her shoulders and everything vanished.

  * * *

  Through the window, Kate could now see the choppers, maybe a dozen of them, and just a scattering of crows on rooftops and flying overhead, above them. With their plane fully exposed now, several of the choppers began to descend—one in the parking lot, another midway up First Street, right in the path of what was supposed to be their runway.

  A voice Kate recognized boomed from the radio. O’Donnell, the prick who
had interrogated her when she was arrested. “Sanchez, Delaney, I’m just saying this once more. Report immediately. You’ve got sixty seconds before I order the choppers to open fire on the Cessna.”

  “Tell him to go fuck himself,” Delaney barked, and started the engine.

  “In two minutes we tell him that. Right now, we tell him what he wants to hear.” Sanchez clicked on the mike. “Agent O’Donnell, Nick here. We’ve got injuries and fatalities. We need clearance out of here. These mutants are still closing in on us. We can land on State Road 24 around Roseland. The road is wide there. If you could have a medevac meet us there, we can get the injured transferred to the trauma center in Gainesville.”

  “Transfer the injured to one of our choppers. It’ll get them to the trauma center faster,” O’Donnell said.

  “Can’t do it. Too risky. The fucks who created this chaos would seize all of us. Tell the chopper to move. Here we come.” Sanchez switched off the radio. “Get us out of here, amigo.”

  “Forget First Street,” Delaney said, and made a wide turn and raced through the marina parking lot, past the chopper that had landed next to the pier. Kate watched in horror as the road rushed toward them, as the boat slips vanished from sight, as the children’s playground appeared and vanished, as trees and electrical wires glistened in the morning light. Their weight was too great; she didn’t think they would be able to reach liftoff. We’re not going to make it.

  Then the plane lifted into the air and everyone on board cheered.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet,” Delaney announced. “O’Donnell may be sending people to Gainesville just to cover his ass. We can be there in twenty minutes. Can you have people there waiting to get you and your group elsewhere, Zee?”

  “Absolutely. Give me a cell and we’ll all be out before O’Donnell even knows we were there.”

  Kate started to object that the plan wasn’t solid enough, but Rocky slipped his arm around her shoulders and said, “Mom, it’ll be okay.”

  She grasped his hand and held on tightly.

  * * *

  The moment they touched down in Gainesville, Kate pressed her face to the window and saw a trauma chopper flying alongside them. Zee’s contacts. She didn’t have any idea what kind of strings he had pulled for this one, what kinds of contacts he had, where he and his people were headed. And there was no time to ask. Zee and the others were instantly on their feet, lined up at the door. But he came over to her, and for moments, they simply looked at each other.

  Her own history lay embedded within the creases in his forehead, at the corners of his eyes, in the quickness of his anxious smile. “You take care, hon. Drop me an e-mail when you get to wherever. Stradivarius111 at hushmail dot-com. It’s encrypted. It’ll ask you a question. The answer is Anno 1689.”

  The year his Stradivarius had been made, inscribed on the back of it. “You, too, Zee. Thank you. For everything.”

  He leaned forward and hugged her tightly, an old man, the last vestige of her father’s generation. She smelled fish in his hair, salt on his skin, and the heart of Cedar Key in his breath. “I’m thanking you, Kate. Me and mine, we owe you and yours.” Then he brushed his hands over her cheeks, kissed her forehead, and moved to the front of the plane to hug Rocky good-bye.

  “Go, go,” Delaney shouted. “Get out of here fast.”

  Kate threw open the cabin door and Zee’s people leaped from the plane to the tarmac, one after the other.

  The trauma chopper had landed twenty yards away and they raced toward it in their tattered clothing, several with packs, most with nothing at all, but every single one of them propelled by their odd beliefs that Zee Small had the scoop on the end-time, that he was their miracle worker. Hell, maybe he was.

  Kate watched them pile into the chopper, and before it had lifted into the air, she pulled the cabin door shut and Delaney revved the engine. She hurried back to her spot on the floor with Sanchez and Maddie, but the engines suddenly died and Delaney’s voice boomed over the PA.

  “Uh, people, we’re blocked on every side.”

  Kate peered out the window again. A dozen black helicopters surrounded them, some still in the air, others hovering at their side, four on the ground, with a pair on either side of the Cessna.

  “O’Donnell,” Delaney said. “Ideas, anyone?”

  “Get us out,” Rocky yelled from the copilot seat. “They’ll put us away in some quarantine hole where we’ll never see sunlight.”

  Maddie quickly stood. “Delaney, Rocky, move back here with Kate and let Sanchez and me sit up front. Then the three of you shift.”

  “What?” Kate said, balking.

  “Because they won’t be expecting to see four dogs,” Maddie replied.

  Sanchez piped up: “I’ll deal with O’Donnell.”

  “Maddie’s right,” Delaney said, and he and Rocky changed places with her and Sanchez.

  Kate glanced through the window, where a chopper had landed and belched out men in hazmat suits who marched toward the plane with fierce determination. Maddie was right. Shock and awe. She began to shift and fell back against the floor of the plane.

  * * *

  Only one man entered the cabin, and he wore a hazmat suit. He took a slow look around, shut the cabin door, and locked it. Maddie tried to see the scene the way he did, a growling golden retriever on the floor between the front seats where she and Sanchez sat; a Great Dane sprawled on the cabin floor with a Belgian Tervuren and a greyhound.

  The man in the suit removed his helmet. “Fuck. You’re hauling dogs?”

  “Agent O’Donnell,” Sanchez said.

  O’Donnell dropped his helmet to the floor. A pulse beat hard at his temple, his face turned bright red. “Is this some kind of joke? Dogs? Where’s that fucking coward Delaney?”

  “He didn’t make it,” Sanchez replied. “He got left back on Cedar Key.”

  “That’s a goddamn lie, Sanchez. I heard him talking on the radio ten minutes ago.”

  “Oh, you imagined it,” Maddie said.

  “You’d best shut your mouth, young lady,” O’Donnell snapped, and pulled a weapon from his suit and stabbed at the air. “I know who you are. That Livingston woman. You disappeared from Florida a year ago. I don’t know how the hell you got into the country, but I’m betting you’re traveling under a phony passport. I don’t know yet what the hell else you’ve done, but we can certainly arrest you for that. You and Sanchez are going to be quarantined for—”

  “Fat fucking chance of that.” Sanchez bolted out of his seat and moved toward O’Donnell.

  “Stay back,” O’Donnell snapped, waving his weapon wildly. “Just stay the hell back, Sanchez.”

  Jessie growled more loudly now, the greyhound snarled, the Belgian Tervuren got to his feet, and the Great Dane moved toward O’Donnell, forcing him to back up to the cabin wall. “I’ll shoot them, Sanchez, shoot all of them,” O’Donnell hissed. “Keep the goddamn dogs in line.”

  “It may be too late for that,” Maddie said, and the three dogs started to shift.

  O’Donnell’s mouth dropped open, the color drained from his face, his eyes bulged. He looked like a man perched at the edge of madness.

  And when Delaney’s change was complete, he calmly reached out and took O’Donnell’s weapon and passed it to Sanchez, who aimed it at O’Donnell. “Sit down,” Sanchez snapped.

  “But—”

  “Sit. Down.” Delaney gripped his shoulder and forced him to the floor. “Here’s the deal, Tom. You’re going to allow us to fly out of here because if you don’t, I’ll bite you in the fucking neck and you’ll become one of us.”

  “I—I—” His eyes rolled toward Kate, Rocky, Maddie and Sanchez, Jessie, then back to Delaney. “How?” he whispered. “How did this … abomination happen?”

  “You’re the abomination,” Maddie shot back. “We should just leave you here on the runway, let the hungry ghosts have you.” She didn’t mean it, she wouldn’t wish that on anyone, but she enjoyed
the horror in his expression.

  “Please … don’t … I … I talked to the hazmat survivors. They described … what happened. We … I … couldn’t put it into any reasonable context. I … the CDC, DHS, all of them breathing down my neck … They didn’t want to believe any of it was true. They sent those survivors for a psychiatric evaluation and I … I knew they would do the same to me if I … I didn’t fall into line.”

  “I told you the truth the day you interrogated me,” Kate said. “You thought I was delusional.”

  “I … I don’t think that now.”

  “Clear us for takeoff,” Delaney demanded.

  O’Donnell’s head bobbed as though it had come loose from the tendons and muscles that connected it to his shoulders. “Radio’s in my helmet.”

  Maddie scooped up the helmet, checked the inside of it, then passed it to him. He got on the radio and barked instructions. Someone on the other end apparently argued with him, but O’Donnell seemed to have enough clout to pull it off. Within minutes, the black choppers on the ground lifted away and those hovering around them veered off.

  “Nicely done,” Maddie said. “If I were you, Mr. O’Donnell, I’d take off that suit. We’ll let you off in Miami or somewhere and you can call home from there.”

  “You may want to put in for retirement,” Sanchez said.

  O’Donnell looked miserable and angry. “You’re all wanted for a variety of crimes. You’ll never get away with this.”

  Rocky laughed. “Watch us.”

  Maddie pulled her legs up against her chest and rested her hands on her knees, the gun aimed at O’Donnell. “It’s really time for you to shut up, O’Donnell.” Then she flashed Delaney a thumbs-up, and moments later, the engines revved, the plane sped up the runway, and they were airborne.

  * * *

  Wayra and Illary landed in a vast savannah, beneath a sweep of sky so crisp and perfect, in air so pure, that Wayra felt certain he had hit his approximate target—twelve thousand years back, give or take a few. It was far enough back in time that it might take Dominica the rest of her existence to find her way again to the twenty-first century.