Phoenix Island (40 page)

A faint click.

“And insert the
cheep
.”

Suddenly, the machine started beeping rapidly.

The assistant gawked. “What’s happening?”

“Cardiac arrest,” Dr. Vispera said. He stared at the machine, where waves shot across the monitor so quickly the baseline now resembled a jagged row of green teeth.

“Oh, man. How did I get this duty?” the assistant said, and glanced toward the door. “Is he dying?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Vispera said, glancing at his watch, “maybe. In ten seconds, the
cheep
will activate. We will see. Five . . . four . . . three . . .”

The beeps came even faster, creating a single note, a shrill whistle of alarm.

“Two . . . one . . . now!”

Carl’s body jerked with seizures for several seconds, then lay still.

Octavia heard but did not hear the beep go steady, saw but did not see the monitor’s green line go flat as a coffin lid.

“Is over,” the doctor pronounced. “The boy is dead.”

A
T THE SECOND OF HIS
death, Carl returned with detached lucidity to his childhood and the place in the Pocono Mountains his parents visited to get away from the city: a small cabin beside a wide creek with high banks in the fold between two steep, forested hillsides—where, in springtime, leafless black trees dripped cold rain, and outcroppings of mottled stone emerged from fading caps of ice, and snow that had blanketed the forest floor for months shrank away to reveal pressed black leaf litter and the yawning rib cages and stitched yellow skulls of winter-killed deer. Once, while wandering these thawing spaces, his boots heavy with mud, Carl had lingered over the bleached jawbone of such a deer, imagining its story and thinking about life and death, and his father had placed a hand on his shoulder and warned him of springtime meltwater flash floods. They came all at once, with little warning, his father told him. There would be only a distant booming, then a wall of water would rage past, there and gone, taking things—and sometimes people—with it.

One spring midnight, Carl awoke to one of these floods passing in the darkness outside, thundering and roaring like the end of the world. The following morning, he stood at the edge of the creek and stared at changes wrought by the passing waters: streamside trees snapped to stumps beneath palpable vacancies where once had towered oaks and sycamores of great size and incalculable age; and below these, further change in the creek itself, where disgorged stones, massive and monolithic,
canted at strange angles like pagan gods of tribes long vanished, and within the broken creek bank, pendulous roots hung, half-revealed, like the disemboweled secrets of the world.

Within Carl, an approaching flash flood boomed—and the wave of change roared through him. . . .

C
ARL OPENED HIS EYES.

He was on his back in a bright room, pain crashing in his skull, filling it. He decided he didn’t want this, and the pain dimmed away.

In its absence, reality gained sharper clarity: the room, the machines, the wires and tubes, the antiseptic smells . . .

He was in the hospital. The Chop Shop.

All of this came to him in an instant, as if sensing the place and identifying it were a single action.

In a flash, he remembered everything—the hunt, the pig, the fight with Stark, Stark talking as he choked him into unconsciousness—and knew they had chipped him.

But he didn’t feel like a zombie. Not even close. He felt . . .
incredible
.

“It’s beeping again,” a voice said. “He’s alive!”

Then it was Dr. Vispera leaning over him, clutching paddles in his hands, a look of surprise coming onto his face.
“¡Dios mio!”

During the brief time it took for those short words to leave the doctor’s bearded mouth, Carl’s senses and mind fired at lightning speed, dilating the moment. Time, for him, had changed, his senses and consciousness moving so rapidly that they created time within time, time to look and recognize and think, while the rest of the world crawled along in slow motion.

In that second, Carl not only saw the doctor, his look of surprise, and the paddles in his hands, but also identified the paddles as the things doctors used in movies when someone’s heart stopped. His eyes and
mind worked so quickly that in that same second, he registered the doctor’s assistant and the relief on his face, and understood, too, that that relief temporarily nullified the assistant as a threat. Simultaneously, he recognized the feel of his own body, all of it at once, the table beneath him, and the small electrodes—seven of them, he knew—taped to his chest and rib cage.

This was absolutely, far and away, the most incredible experience of his life, all of these things coming to him in the second it took Dr. Vispera to shout
“¡Dios mio!”

“Amazing,” Carl said, and he sat up, tearing the electrodes free with one hand, while his other hand, having balled itself into a fist, smashed into the bearded face.

He felt the crunch of bone and saw the doctor crumbling, saw this and knew he had broken the man’s nose but kept moving, body and mind acting as one, thought and action one in the same.

It was unbelievable. His whole life, he had been athletic, and a large part of his boxing success had been due to how quickly he’d been able to convert thought into motion. Someone would take a swing, and Carl would see the punch, dip it, and counter, very little gap between seeing what he had to do and actually doing it. Now that gap had vanished entirely.

So as Carl came off the table, his mind operated at full speed in a world reduced to slow motion, and there was zero delay between seeing what to do and doing it. By the time his right foot hit the ground, he had already oriented himself to his surroundings. All at once, he saw the startled assistant looking toward the instrument cart, noted the guy’s muscles tensing, and understood the threat. Before the guy could even reach for a weapon, Carl slammed a hard kick into the cart, toppling it and sending a wave of tools spinning into the air.

As Carl’s eyes cataloged the airborne instruments, some of them familiar, others not, eleven tools in all, a tidal wave of adrenaline, joy, and absolute amazement surged in him. This was unbelievably awesome. The assistant winced in slow motion, his arms dragging upward in an awkward attempt to block the rain of instruments, his elbows lifting, exposing his . . .

Carl’s hook slammed into the guy’s solar plexus.

Amazing!

He’d always been fast, but never
this
fast. It wasn’t just his mind working more quickly or the missing gap between thought and action. His body had moved without hesitation, everything synced in perfect coordination.

The guy folded, all the air whooshing out of him, and spilled to the floor.

Carl turned.

The doctor stirred, a man who’d tortured hundreds, moaning about a broken nose.

Told you I’d break it,
Carl thought, and was about to say the words when he saw Octavia, and his surging tidal wave of elation froze and crashed down on him.

“Octavia!”

Her face was black-and-blue and fixed in a mask of terror. She sat rigid as a mannequin, strapped into a wheelchair. The exposed flesh of her arms was spotted with burns and crosshatched in cuts. What had they done to her?

He ran to her, saying her name, taking her face gently in his hands. She didn’t move, didn’t react to his touch, just sat there stiff yet alive. Yes,
alive
—he could feel a strong pulse in her neck—alive but frozen, trapped in a moment of paralyzing horror.

“Octavia, it’s Carl,” he said, and he touched her bruised face. “I’m getting you out of here, okay? Just hang on. Everything’s going to be all right.”

She just sat there, one eye bright with terror, the other swollen shut, her mouth locked in mid-scream.

No sooner had the radio set crackled to life than Carl’s eyes flicked to it.

“Stark to Vispera, come in, over.”

Stark.

Carl’s fists ached. Stark. He had caused this—all of it—and had to pay. . . .

“Vispera!” the radio barked. “Where’s my update, over?”

Carl grabbed the radio from the counter and hurled it across the room, where it smashed into the wall, raining pieces down on Vispera’s assistant, who was up on all fours now, crawling away like a frightened animal.

“You!” Carl shouted, his voice an explosion in the small room. “On the ground!”

The guy went flat. “I got no problem with you, man. They just told me to—”

“Shut up,” Carl said, “and don’t move.”

They needed to get out of here, needed a boat to get off this island. Fast. Stark wasn’t stupid. He would come for them. Carl knew there were always jeeps parked outside the Chop Shop. Unfortunately, like so many orphans, he didn’t know how to drive.

He swept what looked like an ice pick off the floor and grabbed Vispera by the lapels.

The doctor cried out.

Carl held the point an inch from the man’s eye. “How many people have you used this thing on?”

“No,” Vispera said.
“¡Por Dios!”

“Look into my eyes,” Carl said. “Don’t . . . look . . . away. We’re going to Camp Phoenix Force. Either you drive us, or I drive this into your brain. Understand?”

“
Sí
,” Vispera said. “Yes, I drive, yes.”

Carl hauled him to his feet and pointed to the assistant. “Tie him up. Use those cords. Hurry.” He hated taking the time, but he couldn’t have the guy calling Stark, and he couldn’t bring him along. The jeep would hold only Vispera and three passengers: Carl, Octavia, and the other person Carl couldn’t leave without. . . .

“Good,” Carl said, and pointed to Octavia, forcing himself again not to really see her, not to think about her. Not yet. He didn’t have time for sorrow. “Wheel her out. Hurry.”

Outside, in the dim, rank Chop Shop compound, they loaded Octavia into the jeep.

“Is good?” Vispera said. “We go now?”

Yes,
Carl thought.
Go now before Stark shows up. Jump in the jeep
and pound across the island, hammer it all the way to the boats
. But he said, “Where’s Campbell?”

“Who?”

“My friend Walker Campbell,” Carl said, and brought the ice pick close again. “You stuck this in his brain.”

The doctor shook his head.

“Tell me where he is,” Carl said, “or I’ll do to you what you did to him.”

Vispera pointed a shaking hand toward the back of the compound.

“Where? Which building?”

“No building. The other side.”

“Stop stalling,” Carl said. “What do you mean, the other side?”

“The other side of the island,” Vispera said, and shuddered. “Beyond the electric fence.”

And Carl understood. The other side, the secret side, the “here are dragons” side. “Let’s go. You’re taking me there now.”

“No,” Vispera said, suddenly looking more frightened than ever. “I will not go there, not that place.”

“Yes,” Carl said, holding the point closer. “You will.”

“No,” Vispera said, and actually inched closer to the pick. “I would rather you kill me now.”

The guy meant it—Carl could see it in his eyes and hear it in his voice—but why? Vispera would rather die than go to the other side? What horrors was Stark hiding there?

But then, before Carl could even ask, the gate opened, and three truckloads of Phoenix Forcers armed with AK-47s pulled into the compound.