New Year Island (76 page)

Juan’s heart accelerated, thudding in his chest.

In the distance, massive streamlined shapes moved between the dark spans of chain. Great whites. One of the sharks seized a part of the shadowy web, and its body undulated violently, tearing something free with its jaws. The entire web shook, rippling chains all the way down to the anchor bolts in the sloping seafloor below.

Juan glanced one last time toward the safety of the second ravine. But the answer to the greatest mystery of all lay in front of him.

Drawn irresistibly forward, Juan kicked out into open water. He swam toward the vast, blurry spider web.

He had to see, had to understand.

Black shapes hung from the radiating network of chains, bobbing in the current. Human figures, their arms and legs unmoving, swayed silently in the mild ocean surge. Dozens of them. Hundreds, perhaps. Row after row—a silent army dressed in black—they floated in suspended hibernation, waiting for a general’s orders.

Many of them were incomplete, he saw. Missing limbs ended in knobs of bone and trailed wisps of whitened flesh that danced in the current. Some were reduced to ragged lumps of meat surrounded by a few tatters of black.

Juan’s breathing sped up, turning ragged and uneven.

The hooded army of the dead faced him in silence, floating in their neoprene wet suits.

C
amilla’s jaw dropped. It was hard to believe what she was seeing on the screen. Juan looked so vulnerable—a tiny figure hanging frozen in midwater, with a giant black flower unfolding in front him. The network of chains shook violently as, a dozen yards from Juan, a great white shark three times his length tore away the lower half of a wet suit-clad body.

In a moment of horrific clarity, Camilla realized that the complex array of chains was a pulley system—almost exactly like the one Lauren had used to pull their jugs of water back to land so long ago. But in reverse. After all, nobody could possibly be insane enough to swim out and try to rebait the empty hooks.

Brent laughed. “Never having to sleep does have its advantages. You’d be amazed how productive you can be when you’re operating at one-hundred-percent efficiency, around the clock.”

“We wondered why so many sharks here.” A grim-faced Dmitry stood next to her. “This is why,” he said. “Like floating whale carcass, it draws them from up and down coast. They come for easy food—all-you-can-eat buffet.”

“And this is why Lauren was attacked,” Camilla said. She felt sick. “Why they tried to attack
you
…”

“Great white is very smart,” he said. “Just like dolphin, they learn.” He stared over his shoulder at Brent. “He is
teaching
them to associate human shape with food.”

“Oh, no,” Camilla breathed. “Juan.”

“Quiet. Down in front,” Brent said, eyes glued to the screen. His grin widened in anticipation.

“This is my favorite part—I don’t want any of you to miss it.”

J
uan had trouble controlling his breathing. The scene in front of him was impossible. There were too many bodies.

He swam forward and stared into the face of the hood nearest him. His heart skipped a beat. Not human—the projecting flap of knuckled gray skin had no eyes, no nose, no mouth.

Blinking, he realized what he was seeing. It was not a face at all. He was looking at a seal’s flipper, curled inside the opening of the wet suit’s hood.

Juan took several deep breaths, getting his breathing under control. He looked at some of the other nearby faces. None of them were human. Each wet suit was packed solid with seal meat.

At last he understood the shrinking seal populations, and why Año Nuevo’s night sounds had become a chorus of fear.

A monstrous slaughter had stained the island’s beaches while the rest of them slept, unaware. A butcher had been diligently at work. Like sausages, the wet suits had been stuffed with bloody seal meat and winched out into the water, night after night.

Brent had been very, very busy.

But something else hung in the center of the web of chains, surrounded by streamers and clouds of billowing white. Juan couldn’t see what it was. The puffy white mass obscured it from his sight.

His heart sped up, faster and faster, hammering in his chest. He swam toward the center of the web.

A great white passed alongside, its sandpaper skin brushing against his thigh.

Ignoring it, he kicked closer.

The whiteness looked like a dancing cloud sitting at the heart of the web, where all the chains met.

Travis hung from the chains at one side of the white mass. The end of the scalpel still protruded from the hollow of his throat. His open eyes were milky and unseeing.

Jacob hung on the other side, his forehead split and gaping, the skull misshapen like a stepped-on orange, his bearded face frozen forever in a silent scream.

Juan swam between them, drawn irresistibly closer to the swirling streamers of white, as if by some terrible magnet.

And then the current shifted. The gossamer cloud of tattered white fabric parted gently, revealing what lay at the heart of the web.

Juan’s eyes widened.

Bubbles exploded from his mouth as a giant, invisible hand crushed the air from his lungs.

The regulator mouthpiece dropped from his lips, forgotten.

Jordan wore a white wedding dress. Ribbons of lacy fabric from its tattered train swirled slowly about her slim, still figure. Her long blond hair drifted in a golden halo around her head. She hung suspended, one hand reaching toward Juan: a beautiful but cold sea queen, flanked by the silent ranks of her dark and terrible retinue.

The bullet’s exit wound in her cheek was nearly invisible. Skilled hands had stitched it back together with delicate precision that spoke of a hate so exquisite it was almost love.

The anger was gone from Jordan’s face. Her dead green eyes stared at Juan, filled with infinite sadness.

The giant fingers around his chest tightened mercilessly. He couldn’t draw a breath. He clawed at his neck.

She looked lost… So very lost.

A terrible, strangled sound of despair tore out of his throat in a final burst of bubbles.

He couldn’t live with this.

Juan shut his eyes tight.

“N
o!” Camilla splayed her hands against the screen. She watched, helpless, as Juan sank past Jordan’s bare feet. He slid from sight, hidden by the bottom of the monitor frame. A final burst of bubbles drifted up through the blue, dwindling away until there was nothing.

She shook her head. He couldn’t be dead. He
couldn’t
be.

She backed away from the monitor, unable to speak. A sob racked her body.

Brent spoke behind her.

“Every survivor’s got a breaking point, Camilla,” he said. “I think we just found Juan’s.”

JT
’s wrist was broken, he knew. She had broken one of his cheekbones, too. He held his other fist next to his cheek, ready, watching her circle him.

A trail of blood ran from Veronica’s ear. He had caught her once, slamming her against the rocks, and she was moving funny now. Her back hitched with every step.

“Don’t make me kill you,” he said. “Then Brent wins—he beats us both.”

“Oh, don’t worry about Brent,” she said. “I’ll get around to him, too. Right after Mason and Juan.”

She wiped blood from her chin, panting in excitement.

“You know what?” she said. “I think I’ll even take care of that simpering little bitch. She’s like Mason’s little groupie.” A puzzled expression crossed her face. “I find that sort of odd. Don’t you?”

“Your second husband was a police officer,” JT said. “He served with honor, did his duty. What would he think if he could see you now?”

She laughed, a throaty chuckle of genuine mirth. “You’re forgetting how he met me. He knew how I was. It even turned him on.”

She stepped over Julian’s squirming corpse, coming closer, and looked seductively up at JT.

“He used to threaten me with it, JT. He’d abuse me, do terrible things to me. Sick,
sick
, beastly things.” Her nostrils flared. “Then he’d tell me how his brother officers would stand by him if I ever fought back. With my history, he could’ve made sure I went away for a long time. He thought I would just lie back and take it
forever
.”

A finger-thick bloodworm looped over the top of Veronica’s athletic shoe, the bristly serrations along its sides rippling with agitation. Looking down at it, she frowned. Then she looked up at JT again.

“Rather grotesque, don’t you think?” With a sharp laugh, she flicked the worm away and focused on him with renewed intensity.

“Leo thought he was safe from me. But I found a way, didn’t I? You
men,
hiding behind your pathetic little uniforms. You think they can protect you while you do whatever you want to us. Tell me, JT, how are women treated in the Marine Corps?”

“Some of the bravest Marines I know are women,” he said. “You’re a disgrace to everything they fight for.”

“Look who’s talking,” she said. “I wonder what Sanchez, DiMarco, and Collins would say about you. But we can’t ask them, now, can we?”

A weight settled over his shoulders. All of a sudden, he felt tired. Old.

“Veronica, it doesn’t have to end this way.”

“Oh, I think you’re wrong,” she said. “I think this is exactly how it ends for you.”

Veronica charged him, her arms blurring in a vicious flurry of strikes.

J
uan’s consciousness was fading. Crushing, invisible coils pulled tighter around his body and held him immobile as he sank. He stopped struggling and settled to the seafloor, ninety feet below the surface, letting it all go away.

A voice spoke in the blackness. In Spanish. Dimly, he recognized his brother Álvaro—laughing, happy, the way he always had been.

“When I saw that
monstruoso
shark tooth, César, I knew I had to get it for you.” Álvaro’s joking voice turned serious. “I know how you love the sea, but I worry about you sometimes, big brother. Keep this next to your heart. It will keep you safe from harm.”

Juan remembered holding the wedge-shaped
megalodon
fossil in his hands for the first time, marveling at its timeless perfection. It was twenty million years old, and his brother had bought it just for him. His heart swelled with affection.

And then he remembered.

Álvaro spoke again. His voice sounded different now. Colder. No longer a memory.

“I understand why you left, big brother,” he said. “Our life—it was not a good life. Maybe for
papá,
but not for us. We would have come with you, César—
I
would have come with you. But you never even asked us.”

Juan’s chest heaved. A few tiny bubbles trickled out through his nose.

“I cannot forgive you,” Álvaro’s voice said. “Neither can Constancia or
mamá.
Nor can
Jordan
forgive you now. We are dead, and the dead cannot forgive.”

The voice in his head changed again, no longer sounding like Álvaro.

“But now other people need you,” it said. “If you die, so will they. Open your eyes,
pendejo
! This, too, is a coward’s choice. You are running away again.”

Juan recognized the voice in his head.

It was his own.

He opened his eyes.

S
ensing a change in the room’s lighting, Camilla raised her head.

Brent was no longer smiling. His face wasn’t lit with a blue glow anymore. She swung around to stare at the monitor.

On-screen, the blue water had disappeared. In its place, she could see a rough tunnel, lit by an uneven row of fluorescent tubes bolted at head height to the rocky wall. The tunnel’s walls were uneven and wet. The ceiling narrowed as it climbed out of sight, shrinking to a narrow fissure in the rock. Below, the fissure dropped into a wide crack in the tunnel floor, alongside one of the walls.

A shiny black figure came into view. Its back was to the monitor as it strode purposefully down the tunnel, holding a gun in one hand.

Camilla’s heart leaped in her chest, filling with joy.

The figure was Juan.

She grabbed Dmitry’s wrist, and he put his hand over hers and squeezed.

Behind her, Mason laughed.

“You can’t kill a survivor that easily, Brent.”

J
uan’s rubber-soled scuba booties splashed through puddles on the floor of the tunnel. A rough-edged crevice a half meter wide ran along one wall, near his feet. Sea foam surged down in the crevice. Orange starfish clung to its sides. The rock beneath his feet was nearly smooth, though. The fluorescent xenon tubes lit everything with a harsh, clinical white light.

He had followed a chain through the second ravine, and it had led him here. Emerging from the water onto a rocky ledge, inside a cave roughly the size of the cistern dome that lay above, he had seen an electric chain haul, lag-bolted to the rock, beside a portable yellow Honda generator. The chain stretched up out of the water to wrap around a steel capstan the size of an oil drum, also bolted to the rock.

There had been two exits from the cave: the pool of water, and the tunnel that Juan now stalked through, gun at the ready. He didn’t expect to find anyone else down here, but then again, Brent had surprised him time and time again.

His heart ached with loss. He wanted to retrieve Jordan’s body so he could bury her properly, but he couldn’t afford the delay. There was too much at stake right now. No more mistakes.

The ones he had already made would haunt him forever.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, Juan stopped at stainless steel double doors set into the rock with a lumpy pour of concrete. The solid-looking metal doors reminded him of a hospital morgue. A red LED blinked from the keypad of a number lock built into the handle.

Raising the Glock, he fired into the lock over and over again, sending white sparks scattering across the steel doors. In the enclosed tunnel, the pressure waves from the gunshots slammed against his eardrums, ringing loudly in his head. Tiny bits of shrapnel peppered his arm and hand, but he ignored their burning mosquito stings.