River of Ghosts (Haunted Florida Book 2)

by Gaby Triana

  Nobody spoke though everyone had begun moving, slowly collecting things while in shock.

  From the beginning, I’d known this was a bad idea, but I couldn’t even blame them because I’d gone along with it. I only blamed myself, though I also felt Kane’s guilt like a slow fog spreading from his aura to mine. But I didn’t want to hear his excuses or pep talk. We had one job and one job only at the moment—to get Linda Hutchinson’s body to the nearest hospital, so I could go crawling back to my village to confess the stupid things I’d done. I didn’t want payment for my time. It’d be blood money anyway.

  Whoever the evil spirit was who’d spoken to us, he still hung oppressively in the room, bearing down his hefty influence, because every single one of us, from the sounds of grunts and sighs and the charging around angrily, acted like we would kill each other if anyone spoke a single word.

  I took Linda’s sleeping blanket and laid it over her body.

  Eve came over and exposed her face in the hopes she might come back to life and breathe suddenly, but I looked at Eve somberly and covered Linda’s face again.

  I could forgive curiosity in coming here. I could even forgive letting the old woman come along if she’d been part of the team for a long time, so much that they all overlooked her ailment, especially if she’d insisted. What I couldn’t forgive was Sharon’s insistence that the séance continue, even as Linda showed signs of physical distress. We should’ve stopped it while we still could. But we didn’t. Because Sharon was selfish and needed what she damn well needed.

  The house could take the bitch alive at this point for all I cared.

  FOURTEEN

  By sunrise, the rain had slowed considerably enough to step out of the house. Quinn and Kane walked over to the airboat to assess the situation. Also to scoop out rainwater using red Solo cups so we could load the boat up and get the hell out of here. BJ, Sharon, and I dragged all the boxes and bags we could out of Villegas House and set up a triage area.

  Inside Villegas House, Linda was dead.

  A lifeless body covered with an open sleeping bag.

  We didn’t dare move her. Everyone seemed too nervous to be near her, except for Eve, who wouldn’t leave her side and continued to hold the old woman’s hand sticking out under the cover.

  Had this happened in our camp to one of our family members, we would’ve cooked for four days as mourning, and part of me wanted to do the same for Linda, but I was not with people of my own tradition, and we’d be leaving soon anyway.

  I lingered outside the door watching her still body while Sharon tried getting a signal on her phone.

  BJ stood near a tree, talking to himself.

  Two hours ago, a sweet woman had been breathing, and now she was gone.

  What would we tell her family? Did she have a husband or kids? It made me sad just how little I knew about her. Fifty or so years ago, death had come to my grandfather and others in this same spot. It made sense that the energy of this house wanted more of the same to feed it. This was why my tribe had told me to stay away.

  Some houses wanted to be miserable.

  Twenty minutes later, Kane and Quinn returned, told us the airboat was ready and that gators had crawled onto the land and piled into a hissing heap.

  It was the dead body within olfactory range. We needed to get a move on.

  The men all carried the heavy boxes loaded with tech equipment while Sharon, Eve, and I carried the backpacks and lighter items. I heard Kane tell BJ that he’d need to board the airboat first to center his weight so we could load the rest of the items around him. BJ, in massive shock over Linda’s death, more so than any of us, lumbered on without a word.

  I watched him.

  Head down, mumbling to himself. I wondered if BJ had ever dealt with a death before, if this incident might’ve provoked painful memories of some sort. I could empathize, having witnessed my brother’s death twenty-one ago, but BJ hadn’t spoken or interacted with anybody in hours.

  Watching the boat rock back and forth, we waited until BJ centered himself in the middle of the vessel before piling boxes and bags around him. All that was left was one backpack and Linda’s body. Kane wiped sweat from his brow using the hem of his tank top. “Be right back,” he said, and we followed him, slapping mosquitos and flinging away sweat.

  I hated the idea of driving the boat along the waterways with a dead body onboard. Traveling in the wild with a body in the beginning stages of decomposition didn’t seem like a good idea. We didn’t need medical help to confirm she was dead, but I knew we had to bring her to a hospital. Her family would want her body recovered.

  Tears had welled up in my eyes thinking about it.

  For the last time, I walked to Villegas House, hating myself for having come here and inciting trouble. Once again, I’d survived what someone else had failed to live through. Sharon and I didn’t speak to each other, because if she even tried, I would snap at her for being a wench and that would not be good mojo for the ride back. Her life was in my hands since I was the one who’d be driving her selfish ass back to civilization. She needed to be nice to me.

  Eve and I stood by while the men entered the house to lift Linda by her shoulders and feet and pull her out of the rotting house. Once they did, they set her on the ground and made room for one or two more of us to help carry her.

  “Babe, can you take the last two bags?” Kane asked Eve. I supposed that meant Sharon and I would help him carry Linda.

  We each took an opposite side of her torso. It felt incredibly odd to carry a dead woman. Her skin felt cold through her shirt, and it seemed that rigor mortis was already starting to set in despite the intensely humid air.

  Taking a last look at Villegas House, I closed my eyes. “Hope you find your peace,” I told the house in a whisper. Too much had happened here. Too many lives taken. Too many buried on the property. Now that I’d seen the place with my own eyes, I would never return. Good riddance.

  We had taken three steps in the direction back to the airboat when we heard it—the sound of the airboat’s engine.

  “What the hell is that?” Sharon asked.

  “Is that our boat?” I said. Or had someone passing through decided to stop and help us, having seen our boat off the island?

  “Put her down, put her down!” Kane barked, and as we set down poor Linda’s body, he and Quinn ran off in the direction of our boat. A sinking feeling dropped through my torso. It couldn’t have been. He wouldn’t have.

  Sharon, Eve, and I ran after the men, tripping over our own feet in an effort to reach the boat before being stranded on this patch of cypress for the foreseeable future. When we reached the point where sloughing was necessary, Quinn and Kane, ahead of us by thirty feet, began yelling.

  “Hey!” Kane shouted, wading into the water then stepping back out once he spotted the gators. “BJ!”

  Unbelievable. He’d done it. BJ had taken off with the airboat, the skiff leaving a heavy wake trail all the way back to the gators making a beeline for our shore. If there was ever a good time to sic alligators on a fellow human, this would be it.

  “He left.” Eve vocalized what most of us could only begin to process. “He left us.”

  Quinn pulled forward his shotgun and began shooting in the direction of the airboat, not close enough to hurt BJ but what I’d hoped was an attempt to scare him into coming back. After four rounds, he cocked it back and shot again before it was out. For the first time, I wondered if he had more shells on him. We would need more if stranded here.

  “Get your ass back here!” Kane kept yelling. “Not cool, man!”

  “Is this happening?” I mumbled. “This is happening.”

  “Fucker. I knew he shouldn’t have come,” Sharon said, pacing back and forth, picking up sticks and flinging them high into the trees. “I always knew he’d do something like this one day, weakling piece of crap.”

  “How did you know?” Eve faced her angrily. “Huh? How, Sharon? Nobody could ever know. Jesus Ch
rist, now we’re stuck here.” She pulled out her phone but again, the storm created a weak signal, and she slammed the phone onto the ground and stamped her feet. “Damn it! We have no chargers. Babe! We need to call for help.”

  “Sure thing, honey,” Kane said over his shoulder. I could feel a darkness growing in him that wasn’t there yesterday or even two hours ago. “Let me just pull out my dead cell phone and charge it using the generator that was on that fucking airboat, and everything will be great!”

  I tried my cell phone too, as Quinn stopped shooting and put the gun back over his shoulder. “I told my family I was going fishing,” I talked to myself. “How are they going to find me? They’re never going to find me.”

  “FUUUUUUUCKKKKK!” Kane yelled again, his voice an echo through the trees. He kicked a cypress root with his sneaker then scrambled back onto land, squatting with his hands over his head.

  Eve flew to her husband’s side, even though he’d given her major shade a minute ago. “He took off. He took off, babe. What do we do now?”

  “Where’s the nearest place to swim to?” Quinn asked me.

  “There might be a gladesmen outpost somewhere, but they move around,” I told him. “They wander and hunt. Could be anywhere. Besides, we can’t swim here.”

  “When we arrived, you said we could.”

  “Six feet maybe. But not far enough to find help. The gators…”

  “Then one of us needs to wait here until another airboat passes by, flag them down,” Quinn said.

  I hated to say it, but unless someone had brought a flare, that was our only option. Waiting for another boat to pass us could take days, a week even. This was how news was made, when teams of soccer players got stuck in cave systems and television production crews got stuck on abandoned cypress islands surrounded by flesh-eating reptiles.

  “Unless there’s a flare inside one of those two bags?” I asked.

  Kane and Quinn exchanged glances like maybe they should’ve thought of that. They shook their heads.

  This was pretty far off the beaten path, but we could always take turns yelling for help and hope that someone airboating could hear us. “You could keep shooting every so often and hope that someone hears us,” I said, pointing to Quinn’s back. “Did you bring more rounds?”

  “I brought a box,” he said.

  “Was it on the boat with BJ?” I asked. “’Cause only one backpack got left behind with us.”

  “Was it the one with the ponchos?”

  “I think so. It’s over by Linda,” Kane said. “I’ll check.”

  Quinn sat by the mangroves. “I’ll keep watch over there.”

  “We’ll stay with you. It’s not like we’re going back to the house,” Sharon said.

  Eve looked at Quinn from her cross-legged position next to Kane. “Actually, the moment the sun starts beating down on us and the monsoon comes back, we may need to get inside that house again. My God, this is a nightmare. I have to call the kids. I have to call them…” Eve broke down crying.

  Behind us, Kane held up the box of shotgun rounds while holding the last backpack, and I had to say, I was surprised by how relieved I felt. He came back and plopped down next to Eve to hold her.

  Damn Eve, she was right. Until someone rescued us out here, Villegas House would be our only shelter from the storms and beating sun. Between the lack of sleep, stress, and incredible guilt I was feeling, I suddenly felt light-headed and wanted to break down. Eve did, against Kane’s shoulder.

  Kane hugged her, holding her tight.

  Avila…

  No.

  Avila.

  Leave me alone. Unless…

  Grandfather?

  God, I hoped it was Grandfather and not whatever demonic spirit had taken possession of Linda. I didn’t want the same to happen to me as happened to the old woman. If death was her reward for connecting with the spirits, I wanted nothing to do with this “gift,” yet the last twenty-four hours had served no purpose except to develop and accelerate it.

  Suddenly, it dawned on me—I was the medium of this operation now.

  I shook my head until it hurt. “Stop.”

  “Headache?” Sharon asked.

  Avila…

  If the dark entity knew I could hear and feel its presence too, would it do the same to me as it had to Linda? It had asked for me. Linda had written my name over and over again during the séance. It wanted me. I was a cursed woman.

  “Please stop.” I was losing it and knew there wasn’t anything I could do about it. In fact, as conditions deteriorated and options waned, I knew it would only get worse inside my head. Feeling overwrought with guilt didn’t help either.

  Kill them.

  “What? No.”

  “Are you okay?” Sharon touched me, but I shook her off.

  “Don’t touch me,” I growled.

  “Jesus, fine.”

  Around me, it seemed that everyone was starting to lose their shit in different ways. Kane sat on the floor, arms over his head, rocking back and forth the way BJ had done. Eve sobbed, her face pressed against her husband’s back, and Quinn paced along the edge of the land just before it dunked into swampy marsh.

  “I can’t…I can’t…” he kept saying. “Can’t die here…can’t.”

  “Oh, shut up, Quinn. None of us can die out here. Like you’re so goddamned special.” Sharon turned and marched back toward the woods. “I’m going to go find a tree to pee on. Screw this.”

  “We’ll have to walk,” Quinn said, taking out his gun again and pointing it in the direction BJ had gone with our one and only airboat full of supplies. “I don’t want to die out here.”

  “Nobody’s going to die,” I said. “Please put that down.”

  “And you know this because?” He aimed a beady glare my way that sent a chill up my arms.

  I had no answer for him. Yes, we may very well die out here with no food, no cell service, no boat to get back to the village, and an army of hissing gators slowly approaching the dead body. One hope was that BJ would use his good conscience to, at the very least, alert authorities that we needed help once he got back to Miami, or…that he’d come back for us himself.

  I kept thinking about my mother. She’d be so worried.

  “You’re fucked when I get my hands on you. Hear me, ASSHOLE?!” Quinn screamed after BJ. “Fucked!” He fired off a couple of rounds into the marshlands. Kane jumped up suddenly and wrestled the shotgun out of Quinn’s hands.

  “You don’t need this right now.” He slung the weapon over his shoulder then took off back to the house.

  I followed him. We needed to stick together to figure out what to do. If only so we didn’t lose our minds. Though with the way I was feeling, for me it may have been too late.

  FIFTEEN

  A woman was dead, and our only transport off this island was gone.

  BJ lost his shit. If he wanted to leave, fine, but why wouldn’t he have waited for us? It wasn’t like we all wanted to stay and he was the only one who wanted to vacate. I imagined BJ getting to the access road where we’d left our cars and struggling to get off the boat. I didn’t care if he slipped and fell into the water, feeding gators, turtles, and fish for days to come. The man had left us in a serious predicament.

  Stress piled on us by the minute, tearing at our ability to think rationally.

  Kane walked in circles, hands behind his head. The heat was starting to evaporate the rain that had fallen overnight, and clouds of steam rose into the air creating curtains of fog that swirled every time he let his arms drop by his sides.

  “I have about eight percent battery left on my phone,” Sharon said, tapping her cell and holding it high in the air.

  Searching for a signal was pointless this far from a cell tower but she could keep trying for all I cared. Restless, I needed to move and find a solution. I couldn’t stay by this house with the gunmetal gray aura, near a dead body starting to decompose. Soon, the corpse would give off a smell, as the day gave ris
e to temperatures near a hundred. There had to be a way out that didn’t involve waterways. It might’ve involved lots of sloughing through shallow water but we would do whatever we had to survive.

  I took off in the direction of the woods behind the house. Maybe I could find an old beaten path for walking the thirty miles home or a discarded old boat.

  “Wandering off again?” Sharon asked.

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t feel like part of this team. Maybe I never had, but especially not after the way things were going. I blamed them for our predicament just as much as I blamed myself. I’d let my ambition get the best of me, something my grandmother had often warned me about. Instead of being grateful and staying humble, I had to go looking for excitement, finding death and abandonment instead.

  If that wasn’t karma for greed, I didn’t know what was.

  “Avila!” Kane called. “We don’t need another dead body on our hands.”

  I walked on. As I headed for the woods, I glanced over my shoulder to find Kane, Eve, and Sharon all standing next to each other, watching me walk away. I wasn’t this callous, but this whole island had changed my temperament.

  Kane shrugged before flipping a hand my way, like forget her.

  Yes, forget me. And if I found a path back to civilization, I wouldn’t share it with anybody. I’d just walk and wade in brackish waters until I made it back. But I knew I couldn’t do that, knew I’d end up doing the right thing and telling the others.

  I’d never felt so pissed toward anyone before. In fact, it was overwhelming. Something made me want to hurt them, pummel that Sharon to a pulp for what she’d done, tackle Kane for still talking to her like she’d done nothing out of the ordinary. Knowing someone’s terrible attitude and doing nothing about it made one implicit in their actions. I held Kane and Eve equally responsible for Linda’s death as Sharon.

  I wandered through the woods hoping an answer would pop up. Any indication of a gladesman outpost, maybe. A marked trail back home—anything. But the trees grew denser and me without a machete, I had to stop and try a different direction. I thought of the ghostly woman who’d appeared here, the one with red hair who I’d thought was Linda before finding her still alive. The one Linda had sketched in her crossword puzzle. Was she one of the dead buried here?