Ghost Key

by Trish J. MacGregor

  Neither man was visible. Neither of them was shooting. Did that mean he’d hit one or both of them?

  Sanchez raised his head slightly and a volley of gunshots exploded through the darkness. He scrambled back, unwilling to fire because it would expose his exact position. Then, suddenly, the other two men from the cart appeared, moving up the road, darting in and out of cover like commandos, boys playing Special Forces. Four of them, Christ. Four against one.

  He leaped up and took off through the woods, just behind a line of trees that paralleled the road, and started firing, emptying his clip. He slammed in another and continued to fire. He moved so fast that by the time they shot back, he was gone. Then someone else started shooting, the gunshots markedly different—automatic rifle, assault rifle.

  Sanchez couldn’t tell if the shooter was targeting him or the men from the cart, so he hit the ground and rolled into the deeper shadows. Breathing hard, he rocked back on his heels, and was shocked to see that the fog from the marsh now rolled through the road. How had it risen so quickly?

  Then the shooting stopped. He no longer heard the sirens. A tense, uneasy silence settled over the road, across the dark marsh. Sanchez felt that if he moved, if he breathed too loudly, the enemy would hear it and the final volley of gunfire would be it for him.

  To his utter shock, one man came forward from the trees along the salt marsh. Sanchez couldn’t see his face, but in the starlight his silhouette looked bamboo thin and he carried a rifle upright, tight against his chest, and had an identical rifle slung over his left shoulder.

  “Guy with the dog, I know you’re in these woods and can hear me,” the man called. “These fucks are dead and so’s the evil inside them.” He stopped on the left side of the road and turned over one of the men. “This here boy used to work down at the local garage. Did some good detail work. Got taken back in late February.” He moved on and rolled a body out from behind a piling. “This young lady worked as a secretary at the high school. She got taken late January, early February. Not sure why they bothered with either of these two, ’cept they needed someone to fix their cars and probably one of these sick fucks liked the young lady’s body.”

  Sanchez crept out to the line of trees, glanced around quickly, warily, to make sure the man was alone. It seemed that he was. “Hey, mister,” Sanchez called. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

  “’Cause I just killed three of them and usually they don’t kill their own kind, at least not like this. So here’s the deal, boy. All this gunfire is sure to bring out more of them. A lot more. Between the fire and the gunshots and the government boats out there, you can bet your ass they’ll be fanning out across the island, looking for those of us who haven’t been taken. I’ve got a refuge, if you and your dog care to join us.”

  Jessie. He whistled for her and she barked and raced out of the dark and leaped up, tail whipping back and forth so fast he thought it might fall off. “Good girl, awesome. Stay close.”

  Sanchez and his dog left the safety of the trees and trotted out into the road. The old man who stood there with his two AK-47s reminded Sanchez of a crow, something about his stance, his arms pulled in like wings, the gauntness of his long face, a beaklike nose.

  “Been watching you since you and your dog took off from the café. You saw what happened.”

  “The mayor went for a waitress named Kate and—”

  “That girl has gone through some shit. Walk with me, huh? Name’s Zee Small.”

  “Nick Sanchez.”

  They met in the middle of the road. Zee wore his long gray hair in a ponytail. His jeans looked like they hadn’t been washed in about five years. No telling about his age—anywhere from early fifties to early seventies. The old man extended his bony hand and Sanchez shut down and grasped it. No images rushed into him, no psychic doors flew open. The only thing he picked up on the old guy was his fervently religious certainty about what was what on the island. It guided everything he did, every decision he made.

  “Thank you for intervening,” Sanchez said as they walked quickly, deeper into the woods.

  Zee turned on a flashlight and kept it aimed at the ground. “We need the good guys, Nick. We’re real short on them right now.”

  “How’d you know I wasn’t one of them?”

  “I was in the café, go there most nights. Food’s good, gives me a chance to see these fuckers up close. When the mayor and Kate went at it, her with them torches, and you took off with this gorgeous dog of yours, I knew you were one of us.”

  “Because of the dog?”

  “Partly that. These stewards of Satan’s don’t like dogs. Or cats. Or any other animal. But I also knew ’cause you weren’t running from fire. You were running from them.”

  Just before the woods ended, they reached an old truck the color of soot and piled inside, Jessie perched between them on the front seat. The old man drove like a maniac on the dark roads, the two AK-47s resting next to him, upright against the seat.

  “Where’d you get your weapons experience?” Sanchez asked.

  “’Nam, lifetimes ago. Here’s the weird thing, Nick. In a rice paddy out in the middle of who-knows-where in 1967 thereabouts, I met one of these mutants. Yes, siree, this boy was one of ours and he was whacked. Kept trying to fuck all the women in this village, his eyes had gone dark eons ago. The thing inside him was ancient, just like the thing inside that pretty redhead from the Island Hotel. Maddie. You met her?”

  Sanchez didn’t intend to tell the whole truth yet. “Yes.”

  “So what about you? Where’d you learn to shoot?”

  “Quantico.”

  Zee slammed on the brakes. “You’re a fed?”

  “I work for the government, but that doesn’t make me the kind of fed you think I am.”

  “Yeah? What kinda fed does it make you, Nick?”

  Here we go. Sanchez flicked his internal switch to the on position. “That ring you’re wearing. May I hold it?”

  “What the fuck for?”

  “You asked what kind of fed I am. I’m going to show you.”

  Zee hesitated, then worked the ring off his finger and dropped it into Sanchez’s palm. It was the easiest kind of reading for him, a gold ring that held on to personal stories. Sanchez closed his fingers over it. No rush of images, just a name, a single name lit up in neon. “Lydia.” Her name unlocked the door to the rest of it. “She died a few years back, you went into seclusion. I see you in the deep woods, distraught. She came to you in the middle of the night, came right into your tent and lay down beside you and you woke and … and—”

  “Shittin’ hell, son. I’ll take that ring back.”

  Sanchez dropped it into Zee’s open palm. The old man worked it back onto his arthritic finger. “I read about you government seers on the Internet. Stargate.”

  The old man obviously wasn’t the ignorant redneck Sanchez had assumed he was. “That was our former incarnation. We’re now called ISIS.”

  “ISIS.” Zee emitted a choked laugh. “Such fancy names. For me, Stargate was a TV show, a movie. Don’t know about no ISIS. Lydia was my wife. And yeah, she came to me in a tent about a month after she died while waiting for a bone marrow transplant. After that, nothing for me was the same. You see the dead, they lay beside you, they touch you and you feel it … I gotta tell you, Nick, nothing in your life is the same again.”

  With that, he put the truck in gear and they drove on, without speaking, to the outer reaches of the island, and into another stretch of woods.

  Eleven

  In the predawn light, Dominica surveyed the smoking remains of Annie’s Café. The entire building had collapsed. Charred bodies lay here and there, unrecognizable chunks of flesh and limbs. A tractor already moved through the area, scooping the debris into several dump trucks to be taken off the island. Two trucks had left already.

  The tractor’s bright lights exposed the utter ruin that despicable Kate Davis had caused. But the physical ruin concerned her less
than the loss of eight members of her tribe, five who hadn’t escaped their hosts when the roof caved in, and three who had been there to seize hosts and had been annihilated by the flames. For these deaths, Kate would pay dearly. Then there were four others who had been on another part of the island, searching empty homes, whose deaths by an unknown cause had resonated through the brujo web.

  A cart pulled up alongside her and Whit got out. “Have they found her?” Dominica asked.

  “Not yet. But she left the island yesterday afternoon, moved her houseboat elsewhere.”

  “There’re dozens of islands out there where she could be, Whit.”

  “Right now, we’ve got a more pressing problem.”

  “What?”

  “They’re in the hotel courtyard, Nica, and need to speak to you.”

  “They?”

  “New hosts of a peculiar kind.”

  She got into the cart with him and they headed for Second Street. She was grateful the fire hadn’t leaped from block to block, consuming the entire island. With so many wooden buildings, it wouldn’t have taken much. As it was, some of the firemen who were hosts to her kind had been so terrified of the flames they had fled the area. She, Whit, Joe, Gogh, Jill, even Liam had confronted their own fear of fire by taking over the job of the firemen, and had put out the flames. She didn’t yet know how to deal with the cowards. She understood their fear; it was also her own. But she had confronted and conquered her fear. Why hadn’t they?

  When she and Whit walked through the gate of the courtyard, illuminated by the lights in the hotel windows, she was surprised to see a group of men and women in Coast Guard uniforms, sitting around two of the tables. Joe and Gogh were serving them food. All of them were hosts to brujos. New blood, she thought. The tribe had lost eight, gained ten. But where had these hosts come from?

  “People, if you can listen up, please,” said Whit. “All of you here know Dominica. She has some questions for you.”

  “I’d like to know how you came to seize these hosts,” Dominica said.

  The woman who stood hosted Luz, a bruja Dominica knew slightly. Her name meant “light.” Dominica liked that. “A bunch of us were traveling in the fog between Cedar Key and some of the islands and saw Coast Guard cutters. Two of them were well ahead of the others so the fog enclosed them and we seized them.”

  “What are Coast Guard cutters doing in these waters, Luz?”

  “According to our hosts, they’re here as a result of a quarantine that was imposed overnight. They’ll make sure that no one from the island escapes by water. Everything from the fourth bridge south is now blocked.”

  “A quarantine?” She looked over at Whit, her expert on all matters American. “Who has the authority to do that?”

  “The Centers for Disease Control, FEMA, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, all of them, I guess.”

  “According to my host,” said Luz, “DHS working in conjunction with the CDC. A substance was found in the bodies of some of the victims. An unidentified virus. They think it’s due to a biological terrorist attack and until they know for sure how it’s spread or how contagious it is, they’ve decided to sideline the island.”

  Dominica’s first impulse was to attack these government boys en masse, seize all of them. But she realized that would make her look scared and weak. Besides, she could use this to her advantage. The locals wouldn’t be able to leave. It would now be easier to control the town.

  “Terrorists?” She laughed and kept on laughing, and pretty soon the other brujos, obviously surprised by her reaction, started laughing, too. “People, we’re terrorists.” Dominica threw out her arms, welcoming the idea. “They’ve just conferred the deepest honor on our tribe. This country is so terrified of terrorists it forces its own people to go through machines at airports that render them naked. And when the passengers refuse, they’re subjected to what amounts to sexual molestation. Terrorists are so feared that the military here invades other countries with impunity and pours trillions into their war machines while their own people are unemployed and hungry and losing their homes. Can you believe the favor they’ve done us? They have no idea what real terrorism is. We’re going to teach them that.”

  “You’re right,” Whit breathed. “My God, you’re absolutely right, Nica.”

  The brujos stole glances at each other, still confused. “But what will we do about food?” asked Luz. “Our hosts have to eat.”

  “We have plenty of food in the market for the time being. But we’ll be sending groups of you out to raid the empty homes and bring back whatever food you find. The important thing is that with the island quarantined, those people who haven’t yet been seized won’t be able to leave. They’re trapped. We’re practically assured of victory now. A brujo enclave in the U.S. of A.”

  “I’ll organize the food-hunting expedition,” said Joe.

  “What about the bitch who started the fire at Annie’s?” asked another brujo. “Has she been caught?”

  “Not yet,” Whit said. “But we’re going to double up on our search for her at first light.”

  “With our new additions, Whit, where do our numbers stand?” she asked.

  He thought a moment. “Three hundred and nine.”

  “Let’s see if we can push it to four hundred by nightfall.” As soon as she said it, she felt the net trembling with excitement. Open season on humans. “But for now, the restrictions about children under the age of sixteen still stand. And no bleed-outs, please. We would have to put those bodies in freezers, and right now we need the freezers for food. Gogh, we’re going to need specific groups to perform specific jobs other than food hunting and searching for Kate Davis. I’ll give you a list of what needs to be done, and you work with Joe and Whit in picking out who does what. I’ll need a couple of brujos without hosts to go out to the fourth bridge and see what’s actually going on.” She turned to Luz. “How many Coast Guard cutters are we talking about?”

  “Probably between five and eight. It depends on how much area each boat is supposed to patrol.”

  “Any idea about what other kinds of reinforcements are being used?”

  “My host only knows about the Coast Guard.”

  “Well, we’ll find out. You can find accommodations for your hosts either here at the hotel or in one of the empty homes on the island. Once you’ve done that, report to either Gogh or Whit so we can assign you to one of the task groups. Any questions?”

  Silence.

  “Excellent.” She gestured at Whit, Gogh, and Joe, and the four of them walked out of the courtyard. “Gentlemen, this is the best news yet. But we have to move quickly and efficiently.” Never let it be said that her defeat in Esperanza had taught her nothing. “Our biggest challenge will be food and controlling the food and supplies we find in the empty homes and restaurants out on Dock Street. Everything should be brought to the Island Market and to the hotel. We may have to implement restrictions of some kind. Any members of the tribe whose hosts are fishermen should be put to work off the docks and beaches. Let’s haul in as much fish as we can.”

  Whit said, “By the way, the two trucks that left already with a haul of debris have been turned back at the roadblock.”

  “Then we need to find another spot for the debris to be dumped.”

  “I know just the place,” Whit said. “The airport runway. You and I can drive the trucks out there, Nica, and make sure these government types who are quarantining us can’t land any planes.”

  “Brilliant. Let’s get it done before the sun rises.”

  The task proved more arduous than she thought it would be. The runway was long and there was so much debris, some of it still smoking, that it took them half a dozen trips to cover most of it. A chopper might still be able to touch down, but only if the pilot was crazy.

  Mixed in with the debris, of course, were body parts. Dominica thought they would attract vultures, rats, roaches, and other vile creatures, so she forced Maddie to walk into the debris to
look for body parts and to deposit whatever she found in plastic bags. She resisted immediately, as soon as she plucked up the first bone, and fought hard to seize control of her body, struggled to scream, to hurl the bone. Whit stood there, laughing and shaking his head, enjoying the show. Dominica struck her nerve centers, causing Maddie such excruciating pain that her knees buckled and she rolled through the scorched wood and dust screaming.

  * * *

  Maddie scrambled onto her virtual couch, unable to resist or fight any longer, unable to hurl her consciousness outside of herself. Her body continued on without her participation, hands picking up body parts—a severed arm, a foot, a hand missing two fingers, a scorched leg bone—and dropping them into a green garbage bag.

  The stench permeated her virtual world, the smell of death she had lived with all these months, the stink of Dominica. The bruja always had claimed that she couldn’t possibly emit an odor, that she was just consciousness. But the reek of rotting eggs and decay was so pervasive that Maddie didn’t think she would ever be rid of it. And it finally drove her out of her body, a screaming nothingness without mass or weight, invisible to the naked eye.

  The rising sun punched a burning hole in the horizon. If she thought herself into that fiery orange hole, maybe she would emerge in some other universe where Dominica had never existed, where brujos were just the stuff of legends, fairy tales, the darker side of Disney. In that universe, she might be in vet school by now, following the path she had intended after her grandmother had moved her to Key Largo, after she had become a runner and a vegan and lost sixty pounds. But then, she never would have seen Esperanza, lived there, experienced the magic of knowing a shapeshifter, of living among people who, as Spock used to say, “lived long and prospered.” She never would have understood the true nature of good and evil or of a reality with all its twists and strangeness.