Phoenix Island (17 page)

C
ARL AWOKE IN HELL.

The air itself seemed to be made of flame, and in his great pain and confusion, his body felt indistinct, as if it had melted into the heat around him.

Slowly, he came to his senses, only to wish he hadn’t. He knew where he was.

The sweatbox.

The cage smelled of filth and decay, sweat and blood. It was perhaps five feet long and half as wide, small enough that he couldn’t straighten out, and so short he would have to stoop if he tried to stand. Not that he felt like standing; he didn’t feel like moving it all. He was awash in a hazy semiconsciousness steeped in pain and ripe with fever. Through blurry eyes swollen nearly shut with bruising, he registered the tightly spaced bamboo bars, the corrugated metal ceiling, and, beneath him, the filthy matting of straw. His vision was so unsteady that the straw itself seemed to shiver with a subtle vibration.

He was in a lot of pain.

Some of his injuries came from the fight. His knuckles, massive with swelling and crisscrossed in deep splits, throbbed, as did the bones in his swollen hands. His right hand wouldn’t work correctly and was almost certainly broken. Both wrists ached deeply. The knife cuts, one a strip of fire on his arm, the other an urgent burning across his ribs, hurt so much even in his semidaze that it felt like the wounds themselves were moving.
General bruising had inflated his entire body, making him stiff and achy, head to toe.

Much of the damage had obviously occurred after the fight, after they’d hit him from behind. This part of the story he pieced together from evidence: the sore knot at the base of his skull, the extreme bruising and tenderness and swelling all over his face, the lips split and especially tender, the ears ringing and sore to the touch. His entire head roared with the worst headache he’d ever felt . . . doubtlessly a concussion. In the back of his mouth, he was missing a tooth. He wondered vaguely if he’d swallowed it. Worst of all were his ribs, which pulsed with pain from top to bottom on both sides and felt like they were splintering whenever he took a deep breath. They hurt so much that they seemed to quiver gently. They were bruised, maybe cracked or broken. He’d had bruised ribs before and knew the pain and how long it took to recover. Only forever or so and then maybe another week or two.

Pain and this methodical inventory of injuries brought Carl further out of his unconsciousness. His throbbing nose drew no air, feeling as if it had been packed with dirt as he slept. Blood and mucus, he thought. Probably broken, too. He wondered, in the conditioned response of all boxers, what his nose would look like this time, and then considered just how bad the smells in the sweatbox must really be, if they were this pungent through a broken nose. Awful. His mouth tasted coppery with blood and was sandpaper dry from dehydration and breathing through it for however long he’d been unconscious. His throat was raw, and his tongue felt shriveled, somehow reptilian. It kept sticking to the roof of his mouth. He knew he was in the grips of a fairly serious fever, but he couldn’t be certain how much of the heat was coming from within and how much of it was the cage itself, which was certainly over 110 degrees. He needed water desperately.

A bowl sat in the corner near a hole in the floor. Staring at this, readying himself for the pain he knew would accompany movement, Carl began to piece together something troubling. That strange, incessant movement he felt in his cuts and over his ribs slowly fell into step with his unsteadiness of vision. Then the subtle vibration of the straw covering the floor coordinated with a soft whisper barely audible behind
the ringing in his ears. Finally, in a moment of dawning horror, his tactile senses sharpened, and through the deep foghorn of pain that had been deafening his perception of the world, Carl detected one final sensation.

A light tickling covered his flesh.

Movement. On his skin, under his clothes, in his hair. Everywhere.

Bugs.

He was covered in bugs.

He surged off the floor, slammed his head into the low ceiling, bumped into the bamboo bars, and screamed, his voice low and raspy—the scream of a ghost long dead—and shook his broken body and swatted at himself and raked, twitching, clutching things from his body and clothing. For several seconds he was lost to madness, slamming back and forth in the small cage, making animal sounds of rage and terror, clawing and plucking and smashing, while within him erupted an absolute volcano of pain. Some of the bugs fought him, biting and gripping into his clothing and flesh with legs like briar thorns. He screamed again to find his cuts bubbling with feeding insects and tore at them with his dirty nails only to utter another hoarse cry upon discovering a hard-shelled black centipede the size of his index finger buried in the open wound over his ribs. He struggled with stiff and swollen fingers to grip the nightmarish thing, which broke in half as he pulled, then broke again and again so that it took an eternity for him to believe that he’d removed it completely.

Later, convinced that all the bugs were off him, he collapsed into a crouch, the whole world pulsing in and out of focus around him. He was out of breath, weak with fever, and nearly blind with pain. Crouching there, he focused on his breathing and willed the pain into its proper place as best he could, channeling the faint ghost of the wisest man he’d ever known—his boxing trainer, Arthur James—until he could almost hear Arthur’s soft voice cooing in his ear, as it had between rounds, telling him,
That’s all right, son. Catch your breath. That’s it. First the breath, then the mind
. Once able, he crawled across the straw to the bowl. Without water, he would die.

Large black bugs with yellow stripes swam in the murky water. He
scooped them from the bowl, crushed them with his hands, and flicked them through the bars of his cage. He raised the bowl to his lips and gagged. It smelled like rotten eggs. This stench married with bad smells coming from the nearby hole in the floor, and Carl crawled to the other side of the cage, careful not to spill the water.

Ignore the smell,
he told himself.
This is life or death
.

He drained half of it at a gulp. It was warm and tasted awful, but it was water, and instantly, he wanted more.
Slow down
, he told himself.
Be smart
.

He sipped more water, but this time he didn’t swallow it straight away. He let it sit in his mouth.
Like I’m sitting in the corner between rounds,
he thought. Arthur would dig out Carl’s mouthpiece and give him only a short squirt of water in order to avoid stomach cramps. He swished it around, letting it soak into his tongue and wash away the blood, then tilted his head and gargled, soothing his throat, and finally swallowed. Only another mouthful or two remained in the bowl. He debated what to do with these. What if no one brought him more? Should he use the last bit to clean his wounds?

No. He needed the water now. If they didn’t bring more soon, he would die before infection had time to really set in.

He inspected the wide, ugly gash on his ribs and pulled from it dirt, pieces of straw, and bits of broken insects. The edges of the wound were swollen and very red, like the lips of a leering mouth smeared in lipstick . . . or blood. Carl thought again of infection, which would probably develop quickly in this climate and filth, and he wondered if his apparent fever was an early sign. He wondered, too, if bugs might’ve burrowed in and laid eggs in his flesh. He’d heard things like that, stories where bugs or ants planted eggs inside people, awful stories, the eggs hatching, the babies eating the person from the inside out.

Just thinking about it made his cuts itch and his whole body crawl with invisible insects, but he put a lid on that nonsense straightaway. No use worrying about it when there was nothing he could do. Not yet. He had to deal with what was real, not what he was afraid would happen. At a time like this, worry was as dangerous as hope. Another lesson he’d learned from boxing: if you wanted to win, you couldn’t let either fear or
hope blind you. You had to see things for what they were and make the right choices and adjustments.

He had to do what he could to keep bugs and dirt out of his wounds. Tearing away the bottom of the shirt, he soon discovered his right hand was so damaged and so swollen that he had no grip, so he used his teeth and his left hand to rip the shirt. He did a clumsy job of it, tearing away more of the fabric than he had wanted. Tying it off was very difficult. It took him several tries, and in the end, he used his right arm to press the fabric up against his ribs and the left to do all the tying. The resulting bandage wasn’t nearly as tight as he had hoped, but it would have to do.

Repeating the process and covering the cut on his arm, he finally turned to eyeing the world outside his small prison.

Through the bars, he could see the barracks and the parking lot, the cattle trucks parked beside the flagpole, atop which fluttered the flag with its burning phoenix.
Well
, Carl thought, the unbelievable heat pressing down on him,
at least they got the fire part right
. He saw the fence, the gate, and, at a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, the guard towers, where a pair of soldiers stood close to each other with rifles slung over their shoulders.

He saw none of the trainees. Thinking of Ross, he felt a fierce rush of affection for his small friend. Ross had known the dangers—he’d read the journal, too—but he’d stood up for Carl anyway, first against Decker and then against Parker himself. The kid had heart. Real heart. He’d taken a beating for defending him, and who knew what he was going through now? Carl hoped he’d be okay. Octavia, too. He cursed himself for his stupidity toward her. Shutting her out over the newspaper article, never bothering to get the whole story straight from her, failing to warn her about the journal . . . he’d really messed up.

He could do nothing to help them right now. He had to keep fear and hope in check and focus on reality.

He knew he might die here. Maybe in the cage. Maybe on display, as an example, in front of Ross and Octavia and everyone else. Maybe they would release him into the jungle and hunt him like an animal.

He drank the rest of the water and dwelled on the possibility of his death for a moment. Somehow, it lacked the sting he would have expected.
He did not want to die, but the thought of death neither saddened nor panicked him. It was merely fact, something to recognize, to know. It could happen.

Everything drew down tight. He thought of the journal tucked away in the book man’s closet, the stories of death and how they had started, one boy dragged out of the sweatbox and executed in front of the platoon.

By Parker, of course . . .

Well, there was nothing to do about that now. They’d had their fight, and now Carl was here, in the sweatbox, and he’d just have to wait and do what little he could to prolong his life. At least he had won. At least he had shown them.

Locked here in this sweatbox, he was completely at the mercy of the soldiers. He pictured Parker aiming a pistol at him through the bars of the sweatbox, pictured himself smiling at the muzzle in one final act of defiance. That would drive Parker crazy, denying him what he craved—the fear of others—even at the end. With this image, Carl laughed aloud, hurting his ribs, and this pain, highlighting the absurdity of laughing at a time like this, only made him laugh harder.

They can hit me from behind and beat me while I’m down and lock me in this cage, but they cannot determine who I am. They can deny me food and water, but they cannot change me. They can shoot me through the bars of this sweatbox or hang me from the flagpole or throw me to the sharks, but they cannot make me cry or beg. I will not allow them. I will determine my own self. I will not look to them for mercy. I will not show them weakness. I will stay strong. If they kill me, they will remember my strength; I will force them to live with the memory of my strength forever
.

And if I live, I will escape from Phoenix Island, and I will tell the world. I will bring these people down
.

HE AWOKE
when a bug crawled into his ear. He roared at the feel of it, tried to pick it out with his damaged right hand, failed, and used his left to pull it free and crush it to paste between his fingers.

At some point, without even knowing it, he’d passed out and slid onto the floor, and now there were bugs on him again. Forcing himself to remain calm, he swatted, brushed, and plucked them away, then smiled grimly to find his homemade bandages had protected the cuts.

It was late in the day. The corrugated metal overhead clicked and pinged as the air outside cooled, yet it still felt like a microwave inside the sweatbox.

Where one leg had lain against the bars, the ankle was red as rare steak and bubbled with blisters. He pushed down his pant leg and forced this new complication from his mind.

The quad remained quiet. He wondered where everyone was. Probably off training. Or maybe in the mess hall. Or getting smoked because of him. He hoped Ross was okay. He hoped Octavia was okay. He hoped Campbell was well on his way back to Texas.

His mind drifted briefly into possibilities: Campbell reaching home, getting in touch with the right people, raising the alarm . . . helicopters landing, journalists and police and soldiers—good soldiers—filling the island, freeing the kids, freeing him . . .

But he shut down this line of thought. It could happen. Could. But
could
was dangerous right now.
Could
led down the dark path of hoping for things he didn’t have enough reason to hope for. He had to stick to the facts, had to remember his plan.

Which was . . . ? He wasn’t quite sure. Wait. Keep his wounds as clean as possible. Look to escape. And above all else, show no fear.

He was very thirsty.

His stomach growled, too, but with the great heat and his fever, the pain and the damage they’d done to his mouth and jaw and ribs, he had no desire for food. Only water.