New Year Island (65 page)

Juan floated in roaring silence.

Her crooked little pinky against his palm, her fingers so lifeless in his.

Shapes moved around him. People. Distant sounds, muffled, as if he were underwater. Somebody leaned over him, sweeping her curly hair away from her face and up behind her ear. A woman with tape across her nose. Why was she crying? None of them were responsible for each other here. Someone had explained that fact, but he couldn’t remember who.

The woman touched his chest, saying something to him. Her warm tears splashed his face. Then she moved away, disappearing from his field of view.

Curious, he turned his head to follow her with his eyes. Now someone else—a stocky man with silver hair—came over the crest of the ridge. Juan knew these people, but their names weren’t important right now. They didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered anymore.

The big silver-haired man reached behind him with a shaking hand and collapsed, sitting down hard on the ground. Leaning forward, he put his face in his hands, shaking his head from side to side. The woman ran over to him. She grabbed one of his hands and tried to pull him to his feet. She pointed back at Juan, but she couldn’t get the big man to stand up. She was still crying—and shouting at the man, too.

Camilla.
He remembered her name.

Her actions disturbed him. They reminded him that something terrible had happened. He couldn’t think about it just yet. He looked away.

A smaller woman—a girl, really—huddled on the rocks nearby, arms wrapped around her knees, face buried in her arms. She had saved his life, but she shouldn’t have done it. The cost had been too high. Another woman, older, with spiky short hair, squatted next to the girl and hugged her. The older woman helped her up. As she led the girl away, she glared at Juan. Her pale eyes bored into him, furious but cold, as if this was all his fault.

He stared up at the sky again. He was starting to remember what had just happened.

It
was
his fault. All of it.

The woman he loved lay dead at his side. Dead because of him.

He couldn’t run away from that.

Ever.

Juan could sense a gulf of despair opening beneath him, ready to drag him under. A bottomless void like the Blue Hole in Belize, like the Marianas Trench—an ocean of pain so vast, so black, so limitless, it promised suffering without surcease.

He now understood that he had only swum in its shallows before, even when he faced his brother on the boat and realized what he had done by running away—how he had killed his sister, his mother, his whole family. It yawned below him once again, an abyss grown so unfathomable that if he allowed himself so much as a glimpse into its depths, he would drown.

What had happened here would destroy him if he let it. So he buried it instead, pushing it down inside him.

He let go of her hand.

Juan tried to sit up but couldn’t. Something snagged on the ground, holding him: the metal shaft poking out of his back near his elbow. He twisted his torso to the side and was able to sit up. It hurt, but not as much as he expected.

He stood.

Reaching behind him, he wrapped a hand around the barbed point and pulled. The shaft slid through his chest, scraping along a rib as inch after inch of blood-coated steel shaft emerged behind him. The angle was shallow. The end popped free, and a stream of blood poured from the hole in the wet suit, spattering the ground behind him. It slowed to a trickle.

Why was he alive? He shouldn’t be. She had shot him in the chest, dead center. He touched his sternum, felt the rip in the neoprene. Tracing the rip sideways with his finger, he found a bleeding hole where the shaft had entered his skin at an angle, right below his pectoral muscle. Sliding his fingers back to the centerline—above his heart—he widened the gap torn in his wet suit, and felt something underneath. It felt like rock. Rock split in half.

Wincing with pain, he reached behind him to grab the lanyard and unzip his wet suit. He scooped the collar under his chin and pulled, sliding the neoprene down his chest. The
megalodon
pendant he wore was broken; the fossilized shark tooth had cracked in half when it absorbed most of the impact, shunting the spear sideways.

Camilla, Mason, and Dmitry stood a small distance away. Juan looked at Camilla’s tear-streaked face, seeing her wide, horrified eyes. With the merciless clinical clarity that follows a deep emotional shock, he could read her thoughts on her face.

She thought he wasn’t dealing with this right. She thought there was something wrong with him. But there wasn’t. He was going to be okay.

Juan looked down at Jordan.

The black whirlpool swirled open beneath him again, threatening to suck him into its bottomless depths, but he pushed it down and chained it shut.

Jordan was dead. He needed to bury her.

Friday: December 28, 2012

C
amilla looked down at the orange line in the sand. Ignoring the tremor in the pit of her stomach, she stepped over the line and walked briskly across the causeway toward the northern part of the island: orange territory—JT’s territory.

Yesterday’s tragedy tore at her heart: Jordan dead, Juan wounded, Natalie traumatized, Brent suffering a total emotional collapse. In the aftermath, the doctor had been totally useless, staggering away with the stooped shoulders of a broken man. She had found him a half hour later inside the station, kneeling in a pool of vomit, so drugged he couldn’t stand.

She, Mason, and Dmitry had cleaned and dressed Juan’s wound themselves, as well as they could, using supplies from the first-aid kit. Juan tolerated their medical fumbling with an air of impatience. The spear had gone through his chest at a shallow angle. But Juan needed a hospital, and soon.

His emotional and mental state worried Camilla even more than his chest injury, though. Juan’s gaze was dull, his face blank. His responses, when he did respond, frightened her with their dislocated calmness.

He had buried Jordan himself. Refusing help from anyone, he had built a cairn of rocks over Jordan’s body while Camilla stood sobbing nearby. Moving like a staggering automaton, his face a mask, he piled rock after rock over her, covering her.

Mason stayed some distance away from Camilla, his face sober. She was hurt by that, too—Mason didn’t trust her anymore. That he could think
she
might have a part in this horror cut her to the core. Dmitry had finally taken her by the arm and led her away, still sobbing.

As sad as she was for Jordan, it was Juan who choked her up now. He reminded Camilla of the bird she saw the first day—the mortally wounded auklet stumbling through its daily routine, not understanding that it was already dead. Sooner or later, the enormity of what happened would hit Juan. It would break through his defenses and crush him in his tracks. She was afraid for him, afraid of what it would do to him when it hit.

But after spending another sleepless night alone and wide-eyed in the station, Camilla knew she had to act. She had to pull them all together again somehow. Their situation was too desperate to worry about individual risk. They were dying, one by one.

Striding past the end of the narrow causeway, her purse clamped under her arm, she crossed onto the part of the island that resembled a seahorse’s head. Her heart thudded in her chest, but she didn’t slow her pace. The rocky ground around her was empty, mocking her errand with its silence.

Camilla was afraid for two reasons. There was always the possibility that JT was the person they were looking for. If he was, then coming out here on her own was probably suicide. But she was even more afraid she would find that, like Heather and Jacob, JT had also disappeared. Or that she would find him dead.

In hindsight, Camilla could see how a hidden hand had set a terrible clockwork machine in motion on the island, with the contestants themselves serving as the gears. She understood only too well now how that fatal mechanism had been wound with relentless precision, turn by turn, tighter and tighter, ratcheting the tension in the springs until they snapped, triggering the cascade of violence that led to the deaths of Lauren, Travis, and Jordan.

But the machine’s architect was not content simply to let it wind down and let events take their own awful course. He or she also hid behind a familiar face while prowling the shadows around them, like a predator stalking the herd, taking the unwary. Taking Heather and Jacob. Taking Natalie, whose rescue became a debt so tragically repaid.

Who was the puppet master?

Veronica was a multiple murderer—the “black widow,” Mason had called her. Camilla had no doubt she had killed her second husband, also, in a carefully premeditated deception that she had gotten clean away with. She had seen Veronica kill Travis right in front of them. But she didn’t think Veronica was the puppet master. She was a deeply troubled woman, but she was only another victim here.

Camilla considered Juan, and her eyes blurred. Logically, it was possible that he had set this up but the plan had backfired somehow, dragging him into the machinery right along with his victims. Her heart told her differently, though. It wasn’t Juan.

She was also sure it wasn’t Dmitry. The three scientists were the most unwitting victims of all, caught like flies in a web constructed for others. Two of them were dead now. She liked Dmitry’s stolid, no-nonsense realism. She was sure she could trust him.

Which left Mason and Brent. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was that one of them was the puppet master. But which one? She had genuinely liked Mason and enjoyed his cheerful irreverence in the face of even the grimmest realities. She missed the closeness they had before, lost now to distrust. And Brent had always been the voice of reason, despite the drugs. He had protected her from Travis and made her feel safe, tended their injuries time and time again. Jordan’s death had been the final straw that pushed him over the edge. It had shattered Brent. Camilla had seen his face.
No one
could possibly have faked that reaction—utter, hopeless despair. Nobody. Which brought her back to Mason. But Mason couldn’t have chained the scientist’s boat.

She had been over and over it all in her head and was no closer to an answer.

She needed to find JT.

Turning in a circle, she scanned the rocky ground around her. Nothing moved but seals. She started forward again, and her foot met a brief resistance. A pile of rocks clattered to the ground several yards away. Leaping backward, she glanced toward the tumbling rockpile, immediately registering it as a diversion. She spun in the opposite direction.

A section of ground behind her rose up, shedding dust and small rocks. A dirty layer of cloth flipped back from the rising hump, throwing more dust into the breeze.

JT stood still and motionless, watching her with no expression on his face. He had a black tactical knife in his hand.

Camilla swallowed. She crouched and felt the ground near her feet, never taking her eyes off JT. Her fingers found the thin length of trip wire.

“If that had been a claymore,” JT said, “you’d be a fifty-foot red stain decorating those rocks right now. What do you want, Camilla?”

“Jordan is dead,” she said.

“I heard. Yesterday.” Under his terrifying coat of dirt and camouflage paint, he looked mournful. “Didn’t think that girl
could
be killed. She was something. I only met one or two like her in the service.”

“Oh god, JT—I can’t believe she’s gone. And Juan… he’s walking around acting like he’s fine, but he’s all shattered to pieces inside, holding himself together like a broken car windshield…”

“Safety glass.”

“Yeah.” Camilla swiped a hand across her face and took a deep breath. “I feel like he’s going to come apart any minute. After what happened to his family, this’ll kill him.”

“Might not just be him it kills.” JT walked over and squatted beside her. He began winding the trip wire. “In Fallujah, a guy in our unit—Robinson—caught an RPG round in the gut. But it didn’t go off. Corpsman was afraid taking it out would detonate it, so he cleared the rest of us out of the room. He and Robinson’s lieutenant stayed. We could hear Robinson through the wall, saying he was fine, it was nothing, he could still fight.”

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened?” He shoved the coiled tripwire in his pocket and stood. “Grenade in his gut finally went off. Cut him in half—killed all three of them. But you’re making a mistake, feeling sorry for Juan. That motherfucker is with Julian.”

Camilla grabbed his arm. “We found Julian. Dead.”

JT rubbed the back of his head.
“Dead?”

“For days. Weeks.”

He was silent for a while. “That’s bad,” he finally said. “Real bad. We’ve been watching—I don’t know—canned cut scenes, like a video game.”

She nodded. “I’ve been trying to figure out how it was done. I feel pretty stupid, actually. We should have been suspicious that Julian never mentioned anyone by name when he talked about game outcomes. It was always ‘the winner’ this, ‘the losing team’ that. It just seemed like that was how he naturally talked: kind of formal, like he was speaking to the audience, too.”

JT seemed to consider this. “Juan must have killed him when they came out here earlier, to set up the cameras and stuff. There’s probably some dead computer geeks, too, got turned into shark bait.”

“It wasn’t Juan,” she said.

He shook his head. “I know it was Juan that set this thing up. What I
don’t
know is why.”

“What makes you so sure it was Juan?”

“Because I
saw
him, sneaking down by the dock dressed in dive gear, the first few nights. I followed him, lost him when he went into the water.”

JT looked at her, and his expression hardened. “He told me he didn’t have air tanks. He lied about that, Camilla. You
know
he did. Why are you protecting him?”

She turned away. “Come with me.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to show you something.”