White crows, p.5
White Crows, page 5
He looked up at the melting struts. “Shit, this bridge isn’t going to last a mile.”
The bridge moaned and swayed violently, and Mira nearly lost her footing again. “Fuck this. I’m not dying up here.”
She ran over to a Range Rover with two people inside, the engine sputtering, the rear fender crushed, and threw open the driver’s door. The teenage boy behind the wheel, a kid with pimpled cheeks who looked all of sixteen, drew back. “Who the hell are you?”
His sobbing companion, a teenage girl, screamed, “You’re flooding it! We need to walk!
“Move over,” Mira snapped. “We’re FBI. We’re getting off this goddamn bridge.”
The boy scooted over quickly into the passenger seat with the girl, Sheppard yanked open the rear passenger door and scrambled inside with the lightning woman’s body.
Mira, now behind the wheel, slammed the door. She tossed Sheppard’s pack on the floor in front of the passenger seat, kept her bag over her shoulder, squashed against her side, and turned off the stuttering ignition. The groaning bridge swayed again, buckling upward, as if heaving in pain. Terrified the bridge would drop into the Atlantic any second, she turned the key and pumped the accelerator hard and fast. The engine finally kicked over and she slammed the Range Rover into gear, and started working her way out of the blockage of cars.
“Ram your way through!” Sheppard shouted.
The teenage boy freaked out. “No, this is my dad’s car!”
Mira crashed into the car behind her. “You’d rather die on this bridge?”
The sobbing girl gripped her thighs and shrieked, “I don’t want to die up here!”
Mira, heart hammering, gunned the accelerator again and the Range Rover slammed into the car in front of her. Now she had enough space to pull away from the blockade and maybe get the hell off the bridge.
She turned the steering wheel hard, pulled out onto the bridge, rammed two empty cars in front of her, reached the bridge’s sidewalk. It was clear of cars, but not people.
“Go! Just go!” Sheppard yelled.
“Stop shouting!” she shouted, and laid on the horn.
People scrambled out of the way.
Mira spotted an opening just ahead on the bridge and tore toward it, horn blaring, tires shrieking. She swung back onto the sidewalk where she saw a narrow path off the bridge and slammed her way through abandoned cars. Every collision and bump and scrape triggered new protests and panic from the boy, fresh sobs from the girl, and more shouts from Sheppard to do this, do that.
Mira ignored what Sheppard said. It wasn’t that she thought his directives were wrong, just that she believed differently. She swerved violently to the right, the SUV shot off the bridge, screeched to a stop, and she threw open her door and leaped out. Cop cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were everywhere, screeching sirens tore apart the air, blue and red spinning lights transformed the chaos into a surreal landscape of impossible things. Dozens of police and first responders fanned out across the mouth of the bridge, trying to get people to safety.
Throngs of panicked people raced the final distance to Tango Key, then the struts snapped, six miles of the bridge collapsed, and cars and people plunged fifty feet into the water. The echo of the screams, sobs, and shrieks of metal would echo through Mira for years to come.
Paralyzed with shock, tears ran down her cheeks. Sheppard, now standing beside her, turned to her, his face ravaged with sorrow, regret. “I’m sorry I was such a dick. Can you forgive me?”
Too choked up to speak, Mira took Sheppard’s hand, drew his arm around her shoulders. “We can’t let these fuckers take Tango Key.” She gestured at the open back door of the Range Rover. “And we need to get her body to Ian’s office.”
4
Afterward
O’Hara felt like he stood at the edge of an abyss, peering into the planet’s future. Most of the bridge was gone. Choppers circled overhead, sirens shrieked, the mouth of the bridge was jammed with vehicles, first responders, survivors of the catastrophe. He watched the bedlam from one of the ferry docks while Annie paced back and forth, texting and calling her mother and Sheppard.
She trotted over to him, alarm scrawled all over face. “They aren’t responding. I’m going down into the crowd, they might be there.”
Unless they died when the bridge collapsed. Neither of them said it, but he knew they both were thinking it. Annie spun away from him and started down the steep hill toward the mouth of the bridge. O’Hara ran after her, his shoes knocking loose pebbles and rocks. “Hey, wait for me.” He caught up to her, grasped her hand, and they made their way down the twisting, narrow path, knocking loose stones, dirt, prickly shrubs, and reached the bottom.
The chaos of terrified, traumatized people was so extreme they couldn’t get near the mouth of the bridge. Just the noise level felt like a violation. But Annie charged on through the crowd and he gripped her hand more tightly so they wouldn’t get separated.
Then O’Hara spotted Sheppard, a giant in the crowd, and made his way toward him, pulling Annie along behind him. She kept shouting, “Mom, Shep!” But her voice was swallowed by all the noise and then they were stopped by a wall of cops, yelling at them to get back, get back.
“We’re with FBI agent Sheppard,” O’Hara shouted. “He’s right over there.” He stabbed his hand toward Sheppard and Mira, one of the cops glanced in that direction, and Sheppard saw them.
He and Mira pushed their way toward him and Annie. The reunion was so powerful and strange and overwhelming that for the first time in his life, O’Hara understood what family meant.
Sheppard pulled him to one side. “We’ve got a body to take to Ian’s.”
“The woman who destroyed the bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“We want to be there for the autopsy report.”
“We’ll meet you at Ian’s tomorrow morning. I’ll text you.”
2
They got home around 4:30 the next morning. Mira showered, then collapsed on her own bed, in her own home, next to Sheppard, already snoring. She stared at the ceiling, disjointed images cascading through her.
Videos of what had happened on the bridge had gone viral within minutes of being posted on social media. Florida’s governor called it a “terrorist attack.” But that conjured images of planes slamming into buildings on 9-11 by Mideastern men, a lousy attempt to distract from the truth—that the woman on the bridge with lightning shooting from her hands was something else entirely.
First, Stoner, then Lightning Woman. 2144. Not science fiction. In a few hours when Rincon conducted an autopsy on her, Mira felt sure he would find an identifying chip in her.
Mira rolled onto her side and reached for Sheppard’s hand. His fingers twitched closed around hers. Can you forgive me? In all their years together, he never had said that to her, never apologized to her for anything. It changed things on a personal level and did so within the context of a broader, more dangerous change. Tango Key was under attack and invasion by people from the future who possessed extraordinary powers.
She pulled a pillow over her head and shut her eyes.
The autopsy room in Rincon’s office felt colder today than it had yesterday, Mira thought, but maybe it was due to her exhaustion, lack of sleep, the uncertainty of everything. They were all here—Sheppard, Delgado, Annie and O’Hara—sitting around the room, staring at the body of the lightning woman. In the bright overhead lights, Mira thought the woman looked vastly diminished from how she’d appeared on the bridge with that lightning pulsing through her.
Yet, her wild, curly hair still held a shine. Those powerful hands that burned with lightning lay motionless at her sides, fingers long, nails short, neatly clipped, no polish, the hands of a pianist or a sculptor. Her expression in death seemed startled, mouth slightly open, as though she had uttered something as she died.
“She looks human enough,” Rincon remarked.
Sheppard nodded. “Yeah. But how does a human possibly do what she did?”
“Maybe like an electric eel,” Rincon replied. “I’ll know more when I autopsy her.”
“Can you explain about the eel?” Mira asked.
Rincon ran his hand over his bald head and paced as he spoke. “My grasp of marine biology is limited, okay? But my understanding is that an eel has three pairs of abdominal organs that enable it to generate two kinds of electricity—low voltage and high. But like I said, I’ll know more once I do the autopsy.”
“Mom, when you were reading the stone woman, you said something about how the dolphins would know,” Annie said. “About fifteen minutes before stuff started happening on the bridge last night, Jon and I were at the center for the last feeding. The dolphins went batshit.”
“In what way?” Delgado asked.
“They were frantic, ramming the walls of their tanks, just freaking out.” Annie’s hands moved around as she spoke, describing the event in gestures. “Two of them escaped into the canal. Then we heard the first explosion.”
“So maybe they really are our early monitoring system,” Mira said. “How’re you keeping tabs on them, Annie?”
“App on my phone. Security cams. My boss is headed here with some marine biologists.”
“The ferries are packed,” Rincon said. “It may be a while before they get here.”
“So where do we go now?” Mira asked.
“X-rays,” Rincon said. “An autopsy. And first, a reading, if you’re up to it, Mira.”
Forget it. That was what she wanted to say. But it was too late for that. She was involved, immersed. “I’ll try.”
“After that, we need a plan,” Sheppard remarked.
“Hey, there’s an exodus underway,” O’Hara said. “And not just snowbirds. Is that what we should do? Get out? People have been emailing me, asking.”
“No way I’m going anywhere,” Delgado said. “Tango is my home, my family is here.”
“I think that’s how we all feel,” Sheppard said.
“Jon’s column about the bridge tragedy went up early this morning and already has been picked up by every major newspaper in Florida and the TV networks,” Annie said. “Nearly all of them are calling it a terrorist attack.”
“That started with the governor,”Mira said. “It’s ludicrous unless ISIS now has super powers.”
“Hey,” Sheppard said, holding up his cell. “It’s not just the media. I got a text from Goot. Within the next hour or so, the governor’s going to declare a state of emergency in the keys and inform us that two thousand National Guard troops are headed here.”
That would mean a run on food and supplies, Mira thought. Like before a hurricane. “No one’s going to believe this terrorist attack routine. Social media has it all—photos, videos, closeups,”
“Regardless,” Delgado said. “Everything here is about to go haywire. The panicked buying, ferries crowded beyond capacity, the airport closing, a curfew.”
“Shit. So it’s like another Hurricane Danielle,” Sheppard said. “That kind of panic.”
Rincon nodded. “We all remember, Shep. We were living here. We’re the old-timers.”
“I’m not,” O’Hara said. “Fifteen years ago I was a kid In Fort Lauderdale with my own ghost hunting group. My parents were riveted to the news about Danielle. My dad wanted to evacuate because at one point her predicted landfall was between Miami and Lauderdale.”
“Did you evacuate?” Mira asked.
O’Hara shook his head. “My mom refused. She said she had a gut feeling. She used to have a lot of those. And they usually were right. It hit Tango and in Lauderdale we didn’t feel a thing.”
Right then, Mira decided she liked O’Hara. And since he would become her daughter’s lover—or already was—she really had wanted to like the man. Now she did.
“I’ll see what I can pick up.”
Mira slipped off her shoes, got up, and started twisting her bare feet against the floor. She deepened her breathing. Then she walked around the autopsy table, surveying the woman from different angles, and grasped the sides of her head. She didn’t pick up anything, didn’t feel anything. She removed the dead woman’s shoes, ran her hands over her feet. Moved to her arms and shoulders. “Nothing’s here. Or I’m just not seeing it.”
“Is it because she’s dead?” O’Hara asked.
“Maybe. But it feels like… it requires skills I don’t have.”
Rincon said, “It’s probably for the best right now. We all need to stock up on gas and supplies.”
“Let’s touch base after the governor’s announcement, see where things stand,” Sheppard suggested. “Ian, text us if the autopsy turns up something unusual.”
“I’m going to stick around and help Ian with the autopsy or whatever he needs,” Delgado said.
While the others gathered up their things, Mira leaned in close to the lightning woman, whispered to her. “What is it I don’t have that would break through that wall around you? What is it I have that I’m not using? Huh? Because I feel like that’s what’s going on here.” She stroked the dead woman’s cheeks with her knuckles and clearly heard four words: Hal fucked me over.
Surprised, Mira cupped the woman’s face in her hands and spoke to her again. “Who’s Hal?”
No voice this time, but her head exploded with a vision.
Inside a warehouse in the dome, a handsome biracial man speaks to several dozen people who listen with rapt attention. Mira hears only a white noise, a low static that keeps her from discerning speech. But the members of the audience line up, all of them holding an object of some kind. One by one, they come forward and demonstrate an ability. Telekinesis. Invisibility. Fire starter. Chameleon. Shape shifter. There are more, but these shock her so deeply she snaps out of it and wrenches back, away from the body drawer.
“Jesus.”
She turned quickly, anxious to get away from the body, and found all the others still in the room, staring at her. “What happened, Mom?”
She thought the information might slip away from her if she didn’t say anything, and blurted out what she’d seen. “Their powers… the ones I saw… are… staggering.”
“What kind of staggering?” Sheppard asked. “Like what we’ve already seen?”
“Stephen King staggering?” Annie asked. “Or like the monster in Stranger Things?”
“Both. More.” And she told them.
“Fuck,” O’Hara said.
3
O’Hara and Annie made their way to the parking lot. He’d crashed on her couch after they’d reunited with Mira and Sheppard at the decimated bridge, and right now, he didn’t have any desire to go back to his place alone. When they reached her car, he felt as awkward as a teen on a first date.
“How’re you set for supplies and food?” he asked.
“Good, I’m good.” Then she suddenly blurted, “Hey, you want to come to my place again? I’ll fix us omelets. Or something. I’m a basic cook, but my fridge is full, and mi casa es tu casa. And honestly, I don’t want to spend any more time alone in my apartment, waiting for the fucking Apocalypse.”
He laughed. He had his iPad, a pack in the trunk that held essentials—toiletries, a change of clothes, chargers, extra cash. “Me, either. I’ll follow you.”
And just like that, it was decided. Everything with her felt easy, comfortable.
Her apartment lay a couple of miles from the Dolphin Research Center, a one-bedroom place above a barn on an old equestrian estate. He hadn’t noticed details earlier, he’d been too wiped out. Now he realized the estate covered several acres and most of the windows looked out onto a training ring, pasture, trees, conferring a sense of spaciousness. It was colorful and haphazardly furnished—Offerup, eBay, flea markets—but felt strangely comfortable to him.
“You can set up over there,” she said, pointing at a desk in front of the window. “I’ll get started on those omelets.” She dropped her bag in a chair and headed for the kitchen.
O’Hara set his iPad on the desk, next to her MacBook Pro, dropped his pack on the couch, sat down and went to work. This column would be his second about the bridge fiasco, with a focus on the aftermath. But halfway through it, the smell of food drew him to the kitchen doorway. Annie chopped up veggies and wore earbuds, her slender hips swaying to whatever she was listening to. Now and then she bopped from the counter to the fridge and back again, everything about her rhythmic, beautiful, natural. But beneath it rippled an undercurrent of wildness, as if at any second her body might explode into some mind-blowing dance performance.
The small kitchen table held four bamboo placemats, one in front of each chair, and a fifth placement in the center with a ceramic dolphin on it. There was a basket of warm rolls, butter, jellies, honey. She grabbed paper napkins from a holder on the counter, pulled open the silverware drawer and brought out four forks and four knives, and turned to put them on the table and saw him. She popped out her earbuds. He heard Taylor Swift.
“Nearly ready,” she announced. Take these….” Napkins, silverware. “And tell me what you’d like to drink. Coffee, lemonade, water, beer…”
“Beer with omelets?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Okay, beer.” He started setting out the napkins and silverware. “Who’re the other two settings for?”
“The head of the table, to the north, is for my great-grandmother, Nadine. The south end is for my dad. They drop in sometimes.”
Oh. Shit. “You see them?”
“Not like my mom does. I mean, she has regular conversations with Tom and Nadine. But sometimes, I see vague silhouettes of one or the other and if I really focus, I can sort of see them.” She set two beers on the table, Tango Tasters, from a local brewery. “I’m better at talking with animals.”
“And the fifth setting with the dolphin sculpture on it?”
“That symbolizes dolphins in the wild. They don’t belong in captivity. When I started working at the center three years ago, I was just out of college and needed a job. I was assigned to Boss, Prissy and Rose, our newest rescues, babies. The four of us got close and I promised them that when they were old enough to survive in the wild, I would free them. Free all of them.”
