Phoenix Island (31 page)

Parker shook his head in mock disappointment. “That’s not
your
shirt. All uniforms are property of Phoenix Island.”

“Sue me, Drill Sergeant.”

Parker laughed. “I should’ve locked you up a long time ago. You’re funny in a cage.”

She said nothing. It didn’t matter. What you did, what you said, it didn’t make any difference here. If Parker had it in for you, you were screwed. That’s all there was to it.

“Well,” he said, “you look pretty dumb with your nose plugged up. Maybe if you didn’t keep it so high in the air, the stink wouldn’t bother you so much.”

“How long do I have to stay in here?”

“That’s ‘How long do I have to stay in here,
Drill Sergeant
?’ And here’s your answer: until I let you out.”

She rolled her eyes. “And when are you going to do that . . . Drill Sergeant?” She stretched out his title, making it sickly sweet with sarcasm. Maybe it was dumb, sassing him, but she couldn’t play the good little girl anymore. He was evil—pure evil, that’s all there was to it—so why hold back?

He shook his head, laughing again. “You’re just like your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“I can see why,” Parker said. “You got white hair like an old woman, and you act like you’re the Queen of France. Who would want you?”

“Where’s Ross?” She hadn’t seen him since the previous night, when they’d dumped her in the sweatbox and dragged Ross into the barracks. Throughout the long night, his screams cut the darkness, like echoes of her nightmares.

“Decker and the boys are getting him ready.”

She was afraid to ask him what he meant, afraid she already knew.

He unsnapped his canteen from his belt pouch, took a long drink, and smacked his lips. “Mmm . . . cool, cool water, know what I mean?”

“What do you want from me?”

“Everything.”

“Stop playing around. You know I didn’t do anything to Medicaid. Ross didn’t, either. It was Decker. You know—”

“Medicaid’s shark food. Just quit your whining, sweetie pie. I’m the boss around here. Judge, jury, and executioner.”

“Oh yeah? Tell that to Stark.”

Parker’s face went deep red, and his eyes bored into hers. “When they hunt you down, I’m going to throw you in a hole and tamp your mouth full of dirt. The last thing you’ll see on this earth is my boot heel.”

She pressed against the back of the cage.

“Well, I’d love to stay and chat, princess,” Parker said, standing up, “but it’s hunting time.”

Down by the barracks, people started shouting.

“Here we go,” Parker said, and whooped in the direction of the shouting.

When he swaggered downhill, she saw them, coming onto the quad: boys and girls waving sticks in the air.

No . . . not sticks . . .

Spears.

At the front of the pack, Decker shoved Ross onto the ground.

Ross, barefoot and bloody, dressed only in shorts, staggered to his feet, looking small and fragile as a third-grader.

Parker yelled at him, pointing toward the gate, which stood wide open.

The kids roared and pumped their spears as Ross ran through the gate, out of the compound, and into the jungle.

“Start the timer!” Parker said, and she saw Funk poking at one of the stopwatches they used on the obstacle course. “Ten minutes!”

“Hooah!” a voice shouted from the guard tower, and gunfire tore into the open sky, making her jump.

“That boy is a thief and a murderer!” Parker yelled to everyone. “He killed one of your own! And now we’re gonna hunt him down like the rabid dog he is!”

“Hooah!” the mob yelled, real excitement clear on their faces even from this distance.

Monsters . . .

“When you see the flare,” Parker said, “the hunt’s over. Come back to base. We’ll have us a gay old time. A bonfire and everything. We’ll put Ross’s head on a stake and dance around it like a bunch of wild injuns! And then, in a couple of days”—he turned and pointed uphill—“we hunt
her
.”

A
LL THROUGH THE SLEEPLESS NIGHT,
Carl’s mind replayed with merciless lucidity the nightmare scene he’d witnessed from the mountaintop. He endured, focusing on one thought: he
had
to get off Phoenix Island.

At dawn, he rose to face another day with Stark. They launched straight into training, no mention of the previous day, as if nothing at all had changed in the world. For Carl, it was harder than ever to smile and pretend everything was all right, but he did it. He had to keep Stark happy. . . .

They started with a grappling session that devolved into a discussion of this samurai book
The Book of Five Rings
, which led to a full-armor kendo session, which took them back to grappling when Stark knocked Carl’s wooden sword to the mat.

During a lunch of frothy protein shakes, Stark said he had to step out for a while.

“Okay,” Carl said, careful to keep his voice nonchalant. “I’ll probably take a run, then finish
The Book of Five Rings
.”

Stark just stared for a second, looking thoughtful, then he gulped down the rest of his shake and set it down hard on the table. “That works—but stick to the north end of the island, okay? Parker has the orphans out in the woods today.”

“Will do,” Carl said, and meant it.

The north end, after all, was exactly where he needed to go.

HE SPRINTED ALL THE WAY
from the hangar, bursting with excitement, and literally laughed aloud when he reached the water, looped around the building, and saw the boat, still floating there, unguarded.

“Yes,” he said, and threw a quick combo.

Then he looked closer, and it was like getting hit below the belt.

Thick chains secured the boat to a stout post.

He stared at the chain and lock and tried to think around them. A key. Or something to break the chain. One or the other. That’s what he needed.

Hefting the chain—each link larger than his hand—he thought he’d better hunt for the key. His eyes flashed to the nearby building.

He smelled garage smells: oil, grease.

He tried the door. Locked, of course. Like so many things on Phoenix Island, this building would surrender no secrets. Just a block building with a single metal door, locked, no windows, no clues. Just another roadblock.

Why wasn’t this boat with the others? It made no sense. Unless . . .

He looked from boat to shed, shed to boat, smelling oil.

He returned to the boat and examined its outboard motor. A quick glance inside the tilted case revealed a charred interior gunked with . . . something. The motor was dead. The boat was useless.

Inside Carl, something faded. This boat useless, the other boats guarded . . . he was back to the plane, and after a night of believing he might be able to use this to escape, he realized more clearly than ever how desperate, how suicidal, his supply-plane plan really was. How in the world could he even get on board?

Maybe escape was impossible.

No,
he told himself.
Don’t give in. Keep fighting
.

Meanwhile, he had to get running again. He couldn’t take too long. The last thing he needed was Stark getting suspicious. He needed Stark’s trust, needed the freedom to keep doing solo runs if he was going to find a way off this island.

So yeah, time to head back.

Still, he lingered for just a moment to admire the sparkling blue ocean. Amazing . . . even here, even now, amid his frustration and concerns,
the ocean pulled him. Its beauty, its tranquility . . . he longed to run off the dock and do a flying cannonball into its warm, blue depths . . . and again he imagined swimming in an ocean and wondered how the salt would taste, how badly it would sting his eyes, and how the currents would feel, pulling as he swam.

But these waters were full of sharks.

Sharks and the dead.

He pictured the horrific scene again, the soldiers flinging the pale, red-haired body out into the roiling chaos of the sharks.

Medicaid.

It had happened right here. He paused. Shouldn’t he feel something? Some deeper emotion? Should he say some sort of prayer? But there was nothing to do or say. Location meant little. The whole island was stained in blood and haunted with the dead. Horror stories lay beneath every square foot of this awful place, and at any time, hidden atrocities might surface like sharks rising from the surf to take a bite out of whatever faith he tried to maintain.

Enough,
he told himself.
You have to keep moving
.

There was no time to dream of swimming in the ocean, no time to mourn the dead. He needed to head back to the hangar and finish reading Stark’s warrior book, needed to stay in the man’s good graces, no matter what, and find a way to escape.

Carl started running again, pointing himself toward home and putting one foot in front of the other while his brain worked without success at the problem of escape. His legs carried him uphill, out of the sun and into the dark and humid jungle. He had just rejected a ridiculous idea—maybe he could find a repair manual and fix the boat, a little at a time!—when an all-too-familiar marshy stench filled his nostrils. Looking to the left he saw the foreboding structure called the Chop Shop and felt the same bone-deep dread he experienced every time he saw it.

Like something out of a horror movie,
he thought. The stench, the tall fence topped in razor wire, all those low buildings rounded with thatch and dark with shadow, squatting in the gloomy compound like giant mushrooms. Poisonous ones . . .

He jerked with surprise.

Someone stood at the fence, staring out at him.

Someone huge. Someone familiar.

Carl lurched to a stop, a grin coming onto his face. No way . . . it couldn’t be.

“Campbell?”

Carl laughed. It
was
Campbell, standing against the fence of the Chop Shop compound, staring at him. Good old Walker Campbell, too cool to show any excitement, even if they hadn’t seen each other for a month.

“What are you doing here?” Carl asked, leaving the road and going to the fence. This was insane . . . and awesome. Campbell! “I thought you left a long time ago. Man, it’s awesome to—”

But he stopped then. Stopped talking, stopped walking, even breathing for a second, alarm mounting in him now that he could really see his friend.

It was Campbell, all right, but there was something wrong with him. Horribly, horribly wrong.

The big guy’s head drooped against the fence, as if his neck muscles could no longer support its weight. His face, always so expressive, was a mask of slack flesh. His strong jaw dangled beneath his open mouth. His eyes, always alert and burning with intelligence, stared emptily at Carl, through him . . .

“What’s happened?” Carl asked in a frightened whisper.

Campbell said nothing, showed no sign he’d heard the question, no sign he’d even noticed Carl. His thick arms dangled loose at his sides, and where his ashen forehead leaned into the fence, the chain links seemed to be pressing into his flesh, into his skull.

“What did they
do
to you?”

Campbell didn’t answer, but Carl’s own mind did, telling him in a cold tone born of a hard life,
You know what they did. You know exactly what they did
.

Fighting down his terror, Carl reached out and touched his friend’s forehead through the chain link. It was cool and dry.

Campbell uttered a low sound like a winter draft moaning out of a dry well, and its chill shuddered through Carl.

“Are you all right, Campbell? Say something.”

The mountainous kid stared ahead, eyes glazed. The lid over his left eye was swollen and discolored, the eye itself badly bloodshot. A long strand of drool hung from his lower lip.

Maybe he got hurt on his last day,
Carl thought.
Hit his head, got a concussion . . .

No. You know better than that,
the cold voice in his head corrected him.
You know exactly what happened to him
.

And he remembered the Chop Shop, remembered Vispera leaning over him, touching his eye . . . his left eye.

Panic shuddered through him. “Oh, man, Campbell. Can you hear me? It’s Carl. Carl Freeman. Can you hear me?”

Another moan, another winter draft from the well, only this time, it didn’t just chill Carl, it froze him solid.

He stared, unable—or unwilling—to make it real.

It wasn’t possible. Not Campbell. Campbell escaped. Campbell was back in Texas, partying it up with his girlfriends, laughing, listening to music, growing back his dreadlocks. Campbell was setting up meetings with his senator, with the news media. Campbell was too big, too strong, too smart, too cool for any of this. . . .

Campbell burped airily.

Carl felt like screaming.

He knew just what had happened here, no matter how much he wanted to deny it. Campbell never left the island. Instead, he got a one-way ticket to the Chop Shop, where Dr. Vispera used him like a guinea pig.

What had Stark said about his beloved master chip?