Wormhole
Sheppard was on his way to the cabin, driving north on Old Post on the western side of the island, past the lighthouse, when three things happened simultaneously. Annie texted that the dolphins were acting up. Keel called and announced something had happened at the ferry docks. Sirens all over the island started shrieking.
These sirens weren’t just those of first responders—cops, ambulances, fire trucks. It was part of the Global Consciousness Project, a system that had originated at Princeton and been put into place on Tango a year after Hurricane Danielle. It had gone offline in 2006, brought back online for the 2017 hurricane season, when Irma had been predicted to hit the Florida keys. Then offline again until this morning, when it was activated by the bureau’s Miami IT team. It was triggered by a variety of factors.
The external factors included abrupt environmental changes in temperature, barometric pressure, and wind speed. Then there were readings from dozens of random number generators situated around the world—and on Tango Key—that measured changes in collective consciousness.
In recent training, the GCP had been explained in a way he hadn’t understood until the events on the bridge. As mind moves, so does matter. In other words, this tool operated according to principles in Mira’s world. And one of those principles was that the impact of consciousness could be measured.
As soon as those sirens went off, he made an abrupt U-turn and raced back down Old Post, through Tango’s downtown and up Old Post on the eastern side of the island to the ferry docks. Bright security lights had clicked on around the docks as soon as the sirens had gone off and illuminated absolute chaos everywhere. People were trying to escape the ferry all at once. Huge supply trucks trundled out onto Old Post, tires screeching against the pavement, their cabs swaying violently into erratic turns while smaller vehicles tried to speed past them and crashed into each other in the process. People who had abandoned their cars on the ferry ran out into the road, waving their arms, shouting for help. The air reeked of panic.
Sheppard parked alongside the equipment at the mouth of the bridge, grabbed his rifle from the passenger seat, and raced uphill toward the docks. He saw Delgado and three other cops trying to divert traffic either north or south, and ran over to him.
“What the hell happened, Carlos?”
“Fuckers were here. Goot’s up on deck. It’s a goddamn mess, Shep. We need help. Some of Keel’s troops are headed here.”
Sheppard ran past people fleeing the docks, the constant screech of sirens pounding against him, his cell ringing and dinging and singing continually. When he reached the ferry’s deck, it looked like a war zone of abandoned cars, many of them smoking, most smashed beyond repair, shattered glass everywhere. Gutierrez and a woman—nurse, social worker, volunteer, Sheppard had no idea—were comforting several wailing children. A man’s severed head lay nearby, his grotesque expression a testament to his shock.
Gutierrez disentangled himself from the kids and hurried over to Sheppard, his face ravaged. “Jesus God, Shep. Three of them. Three of these freaks. The redhead shot fire. The black man turned a soldier to liquid. The kid hurled something that sliced off that soldier’s head. The…” His voice faltered, he swiped at his eyes.
“You saw all this?”
Gutierrez nodded. “We’re fucked, amigo.” He stumbled toward a bench next to the railing and sank onto it, twisting his fists against his eyes. “We have no defense against something like this.”
“Of course we do. Drones. Planes.”
“Nukes?” Gutierrez’s fists dropped away for his eyes and he looked at Sheppard. “Because that’s what it may take. I’ve never seen anything like this. Ever.”
Sheppard had no comforting words, no reassurances. He squeezed Gutierrez’s shoulder. “We’ll figure this out.” It sounded lame, but it was the only thing that came to mind.
He hurried over to Rincon, who was pulling a body bag over the remains of the man who had been decapitated. “Ian, how many casualties?”
“Six so far. Four guards, three passengers. But there’s so much rubble I’m sure we’ll find more. We’re making our way to, uh, the… head.”
“Any idea where the ferry’s captain is?”
Rincon gestured at a tall man standing at the back of the deck, a cell mashed to his ear. “He’s trying to get more ferries here from Key Largo. We need at least two of them operating so people can evacuate and we can keep Tango stocked with supplies.”
“Is there security video?”
“Yeah. Keel’s in the pilot house, viewing it.” He pointed at the stairs.
“Got it.”
“Shep.” Rincon pushed his shades back onto the top of his head and looked up from the corpse he was putting in a body bag. “We’re in really deep shit here.”
“And the shit’s probably going to get deeper.”
Sheppard took the stairs two at a time and ducked into the pilot house. Keel glanced up from the computer. “You’ve got to see this, Shep. The security camera is positioned just above the upper deck of cars. Perfect angle.”
“Faces visible?”
“Yes.”
He started the video. Sheppard noted the time stamp: 6:23 p.m. Then he watched with mounting horror as a soldier’s weapon melted in his hands and his body turned to water and he went down like an imploded building. The redhead set two soldiers on fire and the weird-looking plump kid with the crooked black-framed glasses hurled something at the fourth soldier that sent his head flying.
Sheppard slowed the video down so he could see what the kid had thrown. But even in slow motion, the object moved too fast for him to tell for sure what it was. “What’s that look like to you, Frank?”
“A guy lost his head. His fucking head. That’s what it looks like.”
“I meant the kid. What’s he throwing?”
Keel shrugged. “Damned if I know. But his ability is apparently the speed and precision at which he can throw something. What the fuck, Shep. We need to plaster their faces all over the Internet and post this security footage to the bureau’s YouTube site.”
“My thinking exactly. People need to know what these freaks are capable of doing and what they look like. Send everyone a copy, will you? And that Subaru. Can we zoom in on the plate? I’ll run it.”
Keel zoomed in on it, Sheppard jotted it down, and ran it. The car was registered to Amanda Crowley in Key West. He tracked down her phone number and called her. She answered on the second ring.
“Ms. Crowley?”
“Speaking.”
“I’m FBI Agent Wayne Sheppard and I’m calling about your 2014 Subaru. Did you report it stolen?”
“Stolen? Uh, no. I sold it to this guy who came to the door this afternoon. Nice man, he loved the car, and he paid in cash and gold nuggets. Weird, huh?”
Gold nuggets. Like the ones the lightning woman had been carrying? “Can you describe him?”
“Dark brown skin, curly black hair, under six feet, slender.”
The man on the video, Sheppard thought. “Did he give you his name?”
“Hal.”
Like Mira had picked up. “That’s it? No last name?”
“Just Hal.”
“Thanks, I appreciate the information.”
“Did something happen, Agent Sheppard?”
“He and his passengers were responsible for half a dozen deaths on one of the ferries this evening.”
“My God, yeah, I just heard about the ferry. But he seemed so nice.”
They usually do, Sheppard thought. “If you hear from him or see him again, please text me at this number.”
“Of course. I definitely will. You know, he did say something strange about how where he comes from, people like him are sterilized. Oh, and he also told my daughter she should take a little nap and she immediately fell asleep in her walker.”
Huh? These Crows had multiple abilities? Sheppard already felt like he lived inside a Marvel comic book, but this was beyond Marvel. “Can you tell me anything else about him?”
“He had a slight accent. I couldn’t place it.”
“Was he alone?”
“He came to the door alone. But a redheaded woman waited for him outside. She was fiddling with a couple of cell phones.”
“Did you see a plump kid wearing glasses with them?”
“No. Just Hal and the redhead.”
“About what time was this?”
“Probably two thirty, three.”
So the kid had arrived at some point between then and once they were on the ferry. “If you think of anything else, Ms. Crowley, please text or call me.”
“You bet.”
They disconnected. “Frank, can you take the video back to before the ferry left Key West?”
“Sure.” He played around with it. “Here, as the last vehicle is coming on and the gate is closing.”
“Mostly semis hauling food and supplies, first responder vehicles, and locals coming home for the night.”
“Locals coming home from where? Work? Really? The bridge to their home was pretty much destroyed and they went to work today?” Keel said.
“Type A’s,” Sheppard remarked.
“Well, shit, we worked, Shep. What does that make us?”
“Type A Assholes.” Sheppard tapped the screen. “There’s the Subaru.”
The footage captured the moments as the ferry pulled away from the Key West dock. People got out of their vehicles to stand at the railing. The Subaru was parked near the front of the ferry and when Hal and the redhead got out, Keel said, “Okay, it’s still just the two of them.”
“Maybe they locked the kid in the trunk.”
Hal and the redhead remained in sight at the railing, easy to see because the deck was well lit. Six minutes into the footage, something in the space between them changed or shifted or ebbed, Sheppard couldn’t tell exactly what was going on. He took the footage back thirty seconds, slowed it down.
Now he saw it, the way the air turned as black as India ink and the plump kid tumbled out of it, onto his hand and knees. Hal glanced around nervously, helped the boy to his feet. The redhead hugged him hello. The kid took one look beyond the railing and started crying.
“My God,” Keel said. “Now we know that time travel looks like an ink well.”
“A wormhole,” Sheppard said softly.
But was it? He remembered an article he’d read last year about astronomers who had captured a picture of a gigantic black hole at the core of a nearby galaxy, Messier 87. It looked like a ring of fire around a deep, dark shadow. But there hadn’t been any ring of fire around the inkiness he’d seen. The inky blackness, then the kid. That was it. Yet, if it was true the kid was a Crow from 2141, and that he’d gotten here through some intense focus of collective consciousness, then maybe the inkwell was exactly what a personal black hole looked like. What the hell did he know?
“We’ve just seen something no one else on the planet has seen, Shep. At least, not that we know of.”
What Sheppard heard just then was the awe in Keel’s voice, raw and genuine, and understood it was the emotion that lay behind his remark about capturing a Crow. The thrill for him lay in what he, a biologist, might discover about the nature of reality. But Sheppard cared less about what a black hole might look like than he did about his team seeing this video footage and exposing the Crows’ faces to the general public.
“The time stamp for the beginning of this is 6:29,” Keel said.
Sheppard texted the footage to everyone in their loop. “We all need the information. I’ll get their images sent out as APBs throughout the state and post the video onto our YouTube.”
Keel started to say something else, but his cell rang, and he glanced at it. “Need to get this.” He turned his back on Sheppard, making it clear the call was private. As Sheppard started out of the pilot’s house, he heard Keel say, “Yeah, Rudy. More arrived. I’m playing it all by ear.”
Rudy? Who’s Rudy?
Sheppard paused outside the pilot house to load the video onto the FBI’s official YouTube channel with a short explanation about who, what, and where and asked people to call or email with any information they might have. He included his personal cell number.
By the time he reached the deck with all the ruined cars—just a matter of minutes—the video already had been viewed dozens of times and comments were stacking up.
People were scared.
These freaks, outliers, Crows, whatever name you gave them, wouldn’t be able to show their faces on the island now without being recognized.
2
Shortly after midnight, Mira and Annie started setting out food on the cabin’s long dining room table, along with paper plates, cups, and bowls. It was mostly nibble food that people could snack on throughout the night. Salads, cold cuts, cheese and crackers, sliced fruits, cold casseroles, even peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. There were pitchers of iced tea, water, lemonade, and a coffee maker with Cuba’s best beside it.
Gutierrez’s fiancée, Blanca, a third-grade teacher on the island, had brought flan, black beans, and baked plantains that she now set on the table, the flan chilled, everything else piping hot. “With classes cancelled, I had plenty of time today to shop and cook,” she said.
“A throwback to that life in Salem, Blanca,” remarked Mira. “When you cooked for all the accused witches.”
She laughed. “You think?”
Blanca was a couple years younger than Mira, a pretty brunette married and divorced when she was still in her twenties, with an eighteen-year-old son now in college. She and Gutierrez had been together for three years and she balanced him in a way none of his other women ever had. She was also a book person. Two Saturdays a month, she held events for her students at One World Books.
“You had a life in Salem?” exclaimed Carmen, Rincon’s wife.
She hurried in with a basket of Cuban bread, arepas, chicken and vegetarian empanadas—and her Golden Retriever. Nigel trotted alongside her, a gorgeous blond retriever with a handsome face and soulful dark eyes. He lifted his snout into the air, sniffing loudly at the scents.
“So my dreams tells me,” Blanca replied.
“Were you a rebel?”
Blanca nodded. “I think so. And then in the end I was burned at the stake along with a couple of accused witches.”
“You remember it?” Carmen asked.
“Dreams, like I said. And a regression a few years back with Carol Bowman. Mira carries her books.”
“Terrific books,” Mira said. “Groundbreaking.”
“Damn, girl.” Carmen was an attractive, slender woman of sixty, a yoga instructor who had studied under Nadine, and was also an incredible cook. “So you’ve left us with questions. What did you remember when Carol regressed you?”
Blanca now looked like she might vomit. “Being burned.”
Carmen hugged her. “Honey, no bonfire here.” Then she stepped back. “There’s some arroz con pollo cooling off on the stove that we can bring out when everyone’s really hungry.”
“For me, that’s right now.” Annie picked up a bowl and went into the kitchen.
“When we do we get our turn at surveillance on the roof, Mira?” Carmen asked.
“I think we should take some food and get up there now and let the men grab a few hours of sleep. You two know how to use a weapon?”
Carmen said, “I wish I could tell you I don’t, that I’ve never had a reason to learn how to shoot a weapon. But yes, I can shoot with almost anything. What about you and Annie?”
Mira nodded. “We’re good. Shep made sure. What about you, Blanca?”
“Ha. It’s a relationship hazard, Mira. You know how it is.”
Yeah, she did.
“And we’ll have Nigel,” Carmen said. “No dog has a nose equal to his.”
Mira drew her fingers through Nigel’s fur and he dropped his head and looked up at her with those dark, soulful eyes. “Is that true, Nigel? Can you detect one of these freaks if they come anywhere near here?”
Nigel licked her hand and barked.
“That sounds like a definite yes, Carmen.”
“I’m telling you, Mira, there’s a human soul in there.”
Annie hurried out of the kitchen with a bowl of arroz con pollo in one hand, her cell in another. “The dolphins are restless.”
“Frantic? Nuts?” Mira asked.
“Not yet. But this restless swimming has become the prelude. And it’s been going on for a while.”
“Is your boss at the center?” Blanca asked.
“Yeah. I don’t need to go over there.”
“Good,” Mira said. “So, ladies, let’s take our food up top and join the guys.”
Nigel barked, Mira tossed him a bite of chicken, and he hurried along with them, up to the second floor and then up the ramp to the rooftop defense area.
The idea of everyone being in the same spot for tonight had evolved throughout the day. It was more about convenience than fear, although there was a certain comfort in being with friends and loved ones.
The night was cool and shockingly clear, the moon still nearly full and so bright that it illuminated the area around the cabin—the preserve to the north, east and west, Pirate’s Cove a glow just south of them. They carried the food over to the barbecue area and the picnic table and Sheppard, O’Hara, Gutierrez, Delgado, Rincon, Keel and two of his men, hurried over to eat.
“We’re taking over the watch for a few hours,” Mira announced. “You guys eat, get a few hours of sleep.”
“No way we’re leaving a bunch of women in charge of defenses up here,” Gutierrez said, then laughed and threw up his hands. “Just kidding, ladies. I’d love a reprieve.”
“I need a couple hours of sleep,” Rincon said. “And a shower. I smell like death.”
“Dios mio, Ian.” Carmen wrinkled her nose. “Eat, then go shower.”
Sheppard came over to Mira and handed her an AR-15. She slung it over her shoulder. “You look like an updated Patricia Hearst,” he remarked.
“Thanks a lot. That would be after she’d become so brainwashed by her captors that she joined them, right?”
“Yeah.” Sheppard grinned, leaned down, and kissed her.
His scent lingered. She felt like wrapping her arms around his neck and whispering, Let’s go do it. When Annie was young and either napping or over at a friend’s house, they’d often sneaked away. But even before the events on the bridge, that urge had dried up for Mira. Sex had taken a back seat to everything else.
“I really don’t like it, Shep.” She indicated the AR-15. “But after seeing that You Tube video of what they did on the ferry…” She shrugged. “I don’t see any other choice.”
As she said this, energy coursed through her hands, the same kind of energy she’d experienced on that lookout bluff yesterday, in the moments before pebbles had lifted from the ground. It reminded her there were other options. She immediately pushed the energy away. Not now.
The energy ebbed.
“Just so you know,” Keel said. “We’ve got four Humvees and three hundred troops patrolling the island. The rest are set up in the campground in the wilderness preserve and in Key West. And as soon as we eat, we’ve got to give some of the troops a respite.”
After they’d eaten and the men started retreating downstairs, O’Hara lingered behind to whisper and laugh with Annie.
“She’s happy, Mira,” Carmen remarked, coming over to her. “And he’s a good guy. I like him.”
“Me, too.”
“I hear the BUT in your voice.”
“Psychic women need partners who aren’t threatened by it.”
“C’mon, Mira. Jon has been writing about this kind of phenomena as long as he has worked at the Gazette. He’s wide open to it. He’s not Shep.”
It irritated her that Carmen assumed Sheppard couldn’t—hadn’t—changed. “The bridge was Shep’s turning point, I think.”
“But suppose—when this is over—it’s the same skepticism all over again, Mira?”
She didn’t have to think about the answer. “Then I’m done. I can’t afford to stifle a huge part of my life for the rest of my life to keep peace in my marriage.”
Carmen held up a finger as if testing the temperature of the air. “Cuidado, mi amor. Remember: we all choose. We have free will.”
Mira marveled that in the midst of this entire bizarre situation, with the island under curfew and a state of emergency, they were talking like women often did about what was important to them. Their partners, their children. Both Carmen and Blanca knew about her first marriage to Tom, Annie’s father, and that he and Nadine sometimes appeared to her. But neither of them nor Annie knew that Tom had appeared to her yesterday afternoon in the aftermath of Pam Gibbons’s death.
On her cell, Mira brought up the YouTube video, the APB videos and photos and stared at Hal. He disturbed her. All he did was raise his hand and the soldier’s weapon melted and then his legs and body turned to water. The moment in the video when the soldier’s head struck the puddle of blood and water and started melting, that energy coursed back through her hands.
Mira gestured at the used paper plates—directing the energy, controlling it—and to her shock, the plates lifted up a couple of inches from the table. She raised her hands and the plates drifted upward until they were even with her hands, about a foot above the table. Mira moved her hands slowly to the right, toward the trash can, and the plates also moved. When they hovered directly above the trash can, she brought her hands down slowly, and the plates dropped into it.
Stunned that it had worked so easily, Mira hurried over to the trash can. Carmen, Blanca and Annie applauded and crowded around her. “Uh, Mom, you’ve been holding out on us.”
Carmen: “Really.”
Blanca: “I knew it! I knew you were with me in Salem! You led the resistance!”
I did? Mira walked back to the picnic table, sat down, set her rifle on the floor, rubbed her eyes. The energy kept vibrating through her hands.
Annie and the other two women joined her at the table. “Has this kind of thing happened before, Mom? I mean, at some point earlier in your life?”
“It’s interesting that you ask.” She told them how Tom had appeared to her yesterday for the first time in six years. “He was there just long enough to say, ‘The girl who bullied you… you’re going to need that tool.’ I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, what he meant.”
“You were bullied?” Carmen exclaimed. “Sorry, I just can’t see that. For what?”
“It took me a while to remember. On the way here yesterday, I pulled off in a lookout area and it came to me.”
As Mira told them about the bullying incident in elementary school and what had happened in the lookout area, the energy kept pulsing through her—not just in her hands, but in her entire body, through organs, tendons, veins and arteries. It pulsed at her temples. Two of the platters lifted slowly from the table.
Annie blurted, “Holy shit, my mom is Carrie.”
“Caramba, chica.” Carmen plucked one of the hovering platters out of the air and set it on the table.
“We have a chance,” Blanca said softly, and lowered the second platter to the table. “What else can you do?”
“I… don’t know. There’s something about this guy Hal in the video. I have a psychic connection with him. I don’t know how or why, but it’s there.”
“You can… melt stuff?” Annie asked. “Liquify people?”
“No. I think part of his ability to do that is due to necessity, defense, survival, consent, fear.”
Carmen plucked a slice of apple off one of the platters, bit into it. “Ian’s father wasn’t just an M.D., he was a santero. In the early years of our marriage, when we lived in Little Havana with him and Ian’s mother, I used to attend some of his private sessions with clients. I witnessed things that are still considered impossible. When his santo came through him, his entire demeanor changed. He became hunchbacked, spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own, and with a spin of his hand, objects in the room levitated. He was able to tap into the same matrix of reality, of power, that the Crows do. The difference is that for Ian’s dad, the ability took years to develop and perfect. I think the Crows were born with that access, and this matrix is available to them all the time.” She sliced her hands through the air. “Siempre. They just dip in and use it.”
“Nana Nadine could dip into that matrix, too,” Annie said. “All good psychics can.”
Spoken like someone who had experienced it, Mira thought.
“Goot’s grandmother was a Santera,” Blanca said. “She studied with Nadine in the old days, in Cuba, when they were both, like, in their teens, early twenties. I… had a reading with Nadine a couple years before she died, before I’d met Goot. She told me that at some point early in the 2020s, Tango Key would be invaded by psychic freaks from the future. She didn’t think we’d win because the person who might make a difference would be terrified. At the time, I thought it sounded wacko.”
“Nadine told you that?” Mira exclaimed. “My grandmother?”
“Yup.”
“Damn, she never said anything like that to me.”
“Hey, it wasn’t your reading. But I think she was referring to you, Mira.”
In the later years of her life, Nadine rarely had done individual readings. The fact that she’d read for Blanca before she even had met Gutierrez, Sheppard’s long-time bureau partner, made Mira wonder just how detailed Nadine’s visions had been. Had she seen Mira with these women, in these circumstances, at some point in the future?
“What else did she say, Blanca?” asked Annie.
“She felt that if this person—this woman—could grasp something essential, we might have a chance.”
Mira pressed her knuckles against her eyes. Grasp something essential? What the hell did that mean? Throughout her life, she’d tried to provide psychically specific information to her clients, whoever they were—cops, feds, ordinary people. If she couldn’t find at least one specific detail, she said nothing. What was she supposed to grasp?
Nigel suddenly snarled and barked ferociously, ran over to the closest wall, and leaped up against it, his front legs resting there so he could see over the top of it. They all scattered to their lookout areas. Mira scanned the area below with binoculars, but didn’t see anything unusual. She hit the switch so the security lights blazed in every direction. Nothing.
“It was probably an animal,” Annie remarked, then her cell beeped and sang repeatedly. “Uh-oh, the dolphins are going nuts now.”
She held the phone so Mira and the other women could see it, the dolphins leaping, whistling, agitated. To Mira, it looked like a collective visceral reaction to something she and the others couldn’t sense, but that perhaps Nigel had. Other than an early warning system that alerted them to the arrival of more Crows, it didn’t tell them where the Crows had appeared, how many of them there were or what their abilities were.
“Now what?” Carmen bit worriedly at her lower lip.
“Should we wake the guys?” Blanca asked. “Text Frank Keel?”
Mira thought about it, but not for long. “No, let’s wait and see if anything more happens. If the dolphins keep acting up, if Nigel senses something…”
Annie nodded. “Even if more Crows show up, we don’t have any idea where they are. We need more info.”
It was now going on three a.m., and that F. Scott Fitzgerald line came to mind: In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day. He probably had written that during one of Zelda’s stays in a mental institution when he was six sheets to the wind. Even so, Mira felt like she was locked inside one of those three a.m. moments, and that she needed to move, to do something.
So with her gun in hand, she went over to her perch at the wall, the security light off now, and pulled up a chair and sat down. To her right, Carmen murmured, “Vigilance.”
To her left, Blanca said, “Ojo pelao.” It was an idiom that meant, Keep a sharp eye.
Annie, unarmed, pulled a chair up next to Mira’s. “Eu coosi dao, Mom.”
Their private—and limited—language. I love you.
Mira glanced at Annie, legs raised and shoes pressed against the wall. “Are you thinking I shouldn’t have gotten involved?” Mira asked.
“I’m thinking thank you thank you that you did,” Annie replied. “Listen, should I, uh, have a weapon? Everyone else does.”
“I hate guns,” Mira said. “But here I am. Do you feel like you need a gun?”
“Do you?” Annie shot back.
“Hey, that stone woman asked for me and Jon by name. Why?”
“Mom, listen up, okay? After what I saw you do tonight, you don’t need a fucking gun.” With that, Annie got up and walked downstairs. Mira sat there, then set her weapon on the floor, and stared out into the darkness.