Ghost Hope

by Ripley Patton

  “Kaylee!” I yelled, moving back into the living room, not sure if I should yank the door open and search outside, or demand that Mia and Gordon give her back to me. Before I could do either, the door opened, her small hooded face peering in. “How did you get out there?” I demanded, grabbing her by the arms. “We didn’t know where you were. Don’t scare me like that.”

  I’m sorry, she whimpered in my mind. You and Gordon were angry and it scared me. I didn’t want you to fight.

  “Did you take the cube?” I asked, shaking her a little.

  You gave it to me, she said, her eyes wide. Don’t you remember?

  I didn’t and that scared me shitless. I had lost my memory, but I couldn’t lose my mind. I had to get a grip, had to pull myself together.

  “Let go of her,” Gordon growled, striding toward me, his fists clenched.

  I let go of Kaylee’s arms, preparing to defend myself, but she stepped between us, holding her arms out and halting Gordon’s advance.

  “I wasn’t hurting her,” I told him. “I was just worried.”

  “You’re nothing like my vision.” He scowled at me. “What I saw—what I painted was a man of strength and insight, a spiritual leader. But you’re just a snot-nosed, terrified kid with no idea which end is his head and which is his ass.”

  “Gee, so sorry I don’t measure up to your make-believe wet dream of me,” I shot back. “I’m sure there’s a guy out there somewhere with a PSS chest who will meet all your expectations.”

  “No, it’s you,” he said, shaking his head in disappointment. “But you have no idea what you’re doing.”

  “Oh, leave the boy alone,” Mia chided, coming up behind him. “You were a young fool once too, and that didn’t stop you from acting way too big for your britches. You should go,” she said, skirting around Gordon and holding the door open for Kaylee and me. “We’ll see you again soon, I’m sure, when the time is right.”

  God, I hoped not.

  “Yeah, goodnight,” I said, pulling Kaylee with me into the night, hoping we were headed toward Lonan and the horses.

  * * *

  When we got back to Reiny and Lonan’s house, Kaylee immediately excused herself to the bedroom she shared with Reiny, saying she was tired. I thought she might be mad at me for grabbing her and scolding her back at Gordon’s. Or maybe she just wanted to check out the cube in private. Either way, I could give her a little space. I wanted to talk to Reiny and Lonan about Gordon.

  As I began telling Reiny what had gone down, she didn’t seem as surprised as I thought she’d be. In fact, about five minutes into recounting Gordon Lightfoot’s unbelievable story, I realized something.

  “You already knew this,” I said, staring from her to Lonan and back.

  “Yes,” Reiny sighed. “Mia is our aunt. We grew up hearing Uncle Gordo’s story, along with dire warnings never to share it outside the family or the Mah-zame would come and snatch us from our beds.”

  Now that I knew, I could see the resemblance between Reiny and her aunt. They were both beautiful, strong women. But why keep the relationship from me? Why not tell me before we’d headed over there? The secrecy didn’t make sense. Unless they were still hiding something, and immediately I knew they were. There was still some secret I hadn’t earned and maybe never would. “What’s a Mah-zame?” I asked, hoping to dig deeper without seeming to.

  “The sherriff, or cops in general,” Lonan answered. “Basically the rez boogie man.”

  “And what’s a chooch?” I asked. “Your Uncle Gordon called me one.”

  “It means idiot or moron,” Reiny said, her face flushing red.

  “Don’t worry.” Lonan smiled. “I’m sure it was a term of endearment.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so. Anyway, if this was the great family secret, why tell me? I’m not family.” Mia had tried to say I was, but we all knew that was just something people said to make you trust them.

  “Isn’t that obvious?” Reiny asked. “Your mother and uncle were there. That makes it your family secret too. We thought you deserved to know.”

  “Is that how you ended up working for Uncle Alex and treating me? Because he and your uncle share this secret?”

  “Sort of,” Reiny said, looking uncomfortable. “I mean, that’s how I knew who he was. I’d heard Uncle Gordon talk about him. But your uncle didn’t seek me out to treat you. That was later. When he originally hired me, it was to be a research assistant for a medical study he was conducting on PSS. Then the tribal council roped me into giving him an ultimatum about the compound, and I thought for sure he’d fire me. He probably would have too, except then he found you and needed help bringing you back from the dead.”

  “A study on PSS? What kind of study?” The rest of it, I had already figured out. But this was new.

  “A highly illegal one,” she said. “Pete and I were scanning medical records from the entire US database, searching for certain, subtle, indicators of internal PSS.”

  “Indicators? What indicators?”

  “Ghosting on X-rays. Unusual blood labs. Certain types of feedback on electrocardiograms and ultrasounds. We identified sixteen specific anomalies and your uncle had a program designed to assess and calculate the probability, given a combination of those variables, that each patient had some manifestation of PSS, no matter how slight.”

  “And what was the outcome? What percentage did you come up with?”

  “Ninety-eight percent,” she said, her eye locking with mine.

  “Ninety-eight?” I repeated. I couldn’t have heard right. She must have said “point eight.” Given how rare experts claimed PSS was, even eight percent would have been a huge stretch from the currently held norms. But ninety-eight was ridiculous. “That isn’t possible,” I told her. “That would mean only two percent of the people in your study didn’t have PSS.”

  “That’s correct.” She nodded. “But it wasn’t just the people in the study. We ran a similar search on the medical records of a few other countries as well. The results came out virtually the same. There was a discrepancy of only three-tenths of a percent.”

  “Then your indicators were wrong,” I said. “You started with a false hypothesis, so you ended up with incorrect data.” Maybe I didn’t have a high school diploma, but medical science had always been a fascination of mine, for obvious reasons. If you could learn it on the internet, I had. What she was saying just didn’t add up.

  “We thought so too, at first,” Reiny admitted, “until your uncle went one step further. He brought in a cross-section of the actual patients and we did full diagnostics on all of them. The indicators weren’t false and neither was the percentage. 98.4% of the patients we tested had PSS, some only in trace amounts on a cellular level, but it was there and identifiable if you knew how and where to look.”

  “But that—how can that be? It doesn’t make sense.” I seemed to be saying that a lot lately.

  “It actually does make sense on a genetic level,” Reiny said. “If PSS is some kind of mutation or evolution of human DNA, it would manifest slowly and incrementally in a majority of the population. Only in rare cases, like yours, would it be externally obvious. And internal PSS is hard to detect. Our medical machines and tests aren’t designed to identify it as anything but a mistake or a glitch in the system. But once we identified the pattern in those glitches, it became clear. They weren’t mistakes at all. They were undeniable evidence of a global phenomenon.”

  “And you have proof? You have the stats and the case studies of the patients? I want to see them.” I would have to see it to believe it, and even then.

  “I don’t have them,” she said. “Your uncle kept everything on a closed network, and Pete and I were searched every time we logged in or out, plus we signed a non-disclosure agreement which I’m technically breaking by telling you any of this. I’m not sure what plans he had for the information but he was keeping it under very tight wraps.”

  Of course, the last thing Uncle Alex wanted wa
s for the world to know that almost everyone had PSS. If his special Marked Holders were suddenly just like everyone else, his position of power went straight out the window.

  “So, you did this research in Indy, or at that farm?” I asked. Maybe there was some way we could get our hands on it.

  “Neither,” Reiny said, avoiding my gaze and glancing at the door to her bedroom as if she was afraid Kaylee would hear. “We did it at the compound,” she finally whispered, her eyes coming back at me.

  For a moment, my brain just couldn’t make the connection. Reiny couldn’t be saying she’d worked at the compound where I’d been held and tortured, and my sister killed. The compound where Kaylee had been a prisoner all her life. And once I understood that was exactly what she meant, I still couldn’t say anything. I didn’t have words, just feelings rushing over me like a hot wind. It didn’t matter that she would have been on The Hold side, or for what purpose. There were no sides to that place in my mind. It was all one, horrible, hellhole and anyone associated with it was my enemy. Pete had worked there as well, both of them doing my uncle’s bidding, possibly at the very same time the CAMFers were killing Danielle.

  “Did you work there too?” I asked Lonan, slamming my fist down on the table.

  “No,” Lonan said, “I didn’t.”

  “Fuck you!” I screamed in both their faces. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the money Reiny had given me, throwing it at her. “I don’t want this. I don’t want help from people like you.” She flinched away from me, tears in her eyes, and I was glad.

  As I charged out the front door of the house into the dark desert night, I heard Reiny weeping behind me and Lonan’s gentle voice consoling her, saying “It will be all right. Just let him go.”

  6

  OLIVIA

  “Olivia!” My mother’s voice jolted me awake.

  I sat up in the rental van’s passenger seat, wiping drool from my cheek. The hackers’ Westfalia had stopped in front of us at a massive gate rising out of the darkness, topped with barbed wire and sported several Danger: High Voltage and No Trespassing on Federal Land signs.

  Shit. We were at Umatilla, and I’d fallen asleep, like I always did in a moving vehicle, before I’d explained anything to my mom.

  “Olivia Anne Black,” she said, pointing at the gate. “What is that?”

  “Um—I don’t know,” I stammered. “We must have taken a wrong turn.”

  “Are we there?” Grant asked groggily from the back. It sounded like I wasn’t the only one who’d taken a nap.

  “Well, we’re somewhere,” my mother answered testily. “What the hell is he doing?”

  She was referring to T-Dog, who had gotten out of their van carrying something bulky under his arm. When he set it down and started fiddling with a controller in his hands, I realized it was one of those personal drones. Suddenly, the little thing lit up and went whirling into the air, kicking up dust and flying over the gate. On the other side, it dipped down and stopped, a green light flashing on its undercarriage as it hovered over some kind of control panel. As I watched, a green light began flashing on the panel too, like they were communicating with one another. Because they were. The hackers had started hacking into Umatilla.

  I could feel my mother turning toward me, a question in her eyes, her lips parting to ask it.

  Headlights, high and wide, flashed in the rearview mirror, blinding me. They were barreling down on us, but I only heard the rev of the engine just before the crunch of impact.

  The whole van jerked forward, shoving us toward the back of the Westfalia and stopping only inches from its rear bumper.

  “What the fuck?” Grant yelled, and I heard cries of alarm from Passion and Samantha.

  My seatbelt dug into my waist and my shoulder, but the airbags hadn’t deployed, so that was good.

  In front of us, T-Dog scrambled back into the Westfalia and slammed his door. The gate started to open, the drone hovering on the other side, still blinking green.

  There was another crunching sound and a slight tug backwards. Then, more revving.

  “Shit! Hold on. They’re coming again,” my mother said, jamming the van into drive and laying on the horn like a mad woman. We couldn’t go anywhere. The Westfalia was right in front of us and some lunatic was behind us, gearing up to rear-end us a second time.

  “We have to go through,” I told my mom, gesturing at the gate.

  “I know,” she said, glaring out at the Westfalia and revving our engine now. “Get out of my way, you little fuckers,” she mumbled under her breath, laying on the horn again and not letting up.

  The vehicle behind was almost upon us. I could hear it coming.

  Up ahead, T-dog glanced at me in his side view mirror, but it was too dark to read his expression. Had the hackers set us up? Was this their doing?

  The gate was open wider now, maybe wide enough for the Westfalia, but would it be enough for our bigger van?

  “Hold on,” my mom said, glancing in the rearview mirror and slamming her foot on the gas.

  I braced myself, this time for impact from the back and front, but it didn’t come.

  We surged forward, gently kissing the back bumper of the Westfalia, both of us racing through the still opening gate. I heard a horrible sound, metal screeching against metal, and sparks flew in a shower away from us as the huge closures of the gate scraped down both sides of our van.

  As soon as we were free and clear, the Westfalia veered off to the right and pulled to a stop. As we drove past, I could see T-Dog holding the drone remote out his window, working it frantically, trying to close the gate before our attackers made it in. But he wasn’t fast enough. The pick-up truck that had rear-ended us roared forward, squeezing through just like we had. For a moment, I thought it had a really weird hood ornament, but then I realized it was the drone, flying low and toward us in front of the truck.

  “Get higher,” I murmured to the little thing. As if hearing me, it did, rising above the front of the truck only to plummet a second later just as the vehicle overtook it.

  And then it was gone, sucked under the huge wheel of the big truck with a soft crunch and a shower of shrapnel spraying from its undercarriage.

  “Stop the van,” I told my mother, but she’d already turned and was pulling up alongside the Westfalia.

  “Who the fuck is that?” I shouted out my window at Chase, pointing at the truck as it pulled up, headlights blinding us all, the gate clanging shut behind it.

  “I have no idea,” he shouted back. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

  A truck door slammed.

  A dark form moved, crossing the dusty swathe of its high beams, and a man emerged, tall, wrinkled, and tan, wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. I had never seen him before, but he reminded me a little of Clint Eastwood and everything about him screamed CAMFer, especially the long rifle dangling from his right hand.

  “Everybody stay here and let me handle this,” I said. I was out the door before my mom could protest. If the CAMFers were here for me, I wasn’t going to let them have anyone else I cared about. Not this time.

  But Chase and T-dog were already out too, T-Dog holding the drone controller dejectedly in his hands.

  “Hey!” Cowboy CAMFer yelled, looking us over and gesturing to the signs on the fence. “You kids are trespassing.”

  “You from the government?” I asked, fuming, but trying to keep myself in check.

  “Nope,” he said, spitting something black from between his teeth, his eyes flicking to my ghost hand and back up to my face. “Can’t say that I am.”

  “Then we’re not the only ones trespassing,” I pointed out.

  “Are you crazy?” my mother demanded, charging up from behind me. “You almost killed us,” she said, getting right up in the guy’s face and wagging her finger at him. She was so mad, I don’t think she even noticed the gun. “It’s the middle of the night, we take an innocent wrong turn, and suddenly we’re being rear-ended,
bullied, and told we’re trespassing on land you forced us to drive onto. Do you have insurance? Because that”—she pointed at our van—“is a rental, and I’m not paying for the damage you just did to it.”

  “A wrong turn?” he said. “I don’t think so. These two”—he gestured at T-dog and Chase—“just cracked a high-level government security gate.”

  “We weren’t trying to crack anything.” T-Dog jumped in. “We just got lost, man, and Chase was like, ‘Whoa, that’s a massive fence, dude. Let’s fly your Phantom over it.’ And technically it wasn’t trespassing because airspace is in the public domain. But that drone cost me five hundred dollars. Why’d you have to smash it?” T-Dog bent down and picked up a piece of what had once been his drone, cradling it in his palm. It was a pretty good shtick. I almost believed it, but I doubted this guy would.

  “You’re saying you accidentally opened it?” Cowboy scoffed. “Boy, I wasn’t born yesterday. I know exactly who you are, with your hippie vans and special drones. You tree huggers always send women and children to do your dirty work.”

  Tree huggers? What the hell was this guy talking about?

  “Who is this wacko and why did he ram us?” Grant asked, joining the group with Passion and Samantha hand-in-hand right behind him. Grant was acting casual, but I saw him glance at the rifle and then back at me.

  I shook my head, ever so slightly. The last thing we needed was someone playing the hero. It was looking more and more like this guy wasn’t a CAMFer, but just some local lunatic. And apparently, he thought we were environmentalists or something. He was sizing us up now, his eyes scanning our little group, pausing a moment on Samantha’s PSS ear, curious and calculating, but not hostile. He hadn’t reacted to my ghost hand either.

  Then, it finally dawned on my mother that this crazy old coot had a gun, and she went straight into therapist mode. “I’m not sure who you think we are,” she said calmly. “But this seems to be a case of mistaken identity. Why don’t you explain to us why you’re here, and what this place is, and maybe we can all sort it out together.”