New Year Island (78 page)

The monitor screen went blank.

• • •

Hands on Camilla’s arms, strong but gentle, possessive. They pulled her away from the darkened screen.
Mason.
She turned to hug him, to let loose the sobs that were trying to tear her insides apart.

Then she remembered what he was.

She shoved him away forcefully and sank to her knees, chest heaving. He stepped back, palms upraised. Her hands hurt. There was blood on Mason’s shirt, blood smeared on the monitor, too. She didn’t care.

Mason didn’t approach her again. He was afraid of her.
Mason
was afraid of
her
. Maybe Juan was right to leave her behind. Maybe she did belong here, with Brent. With Mason. She realized that Brent was speaking to her, and the honest sympathy in his rumbling voice shattered her last defenses.

“I’m truly sorry, Camilla,” he said. “I know you had hoped for better from Juan. But now you can see what he really is. What
all
you survivors are.”

She would never see Avery again, she knew. Never see any of her kids again. They would all wonder what they had done to make
her
abandon them, too. And little Avery would sit and wait for her because of the promise she was now breaking. He would wait, and wait, and blame himself when she never came.

He would wish he were dead.

Gasping, she tried to draw a deep breath, but her chest and stomach tightened like a fist, curling her body over. Pulling her elbows into her lap, she huddled on the floor, rocking, wanting to retreat into herself and leave all this hurt behind. She would just shut everything out, as she had as a child, and go away again—maybe forever, this time.

“Juan
wasn’t
going to leave us,” she said, her voice weak. “But he found something else that we didn’t see. You put something down there that
made
him do it.”

“Whatever his reasons, he won’t get far,” Brent said. “I left an empty scrubber in the rebreather. He’ll be unconscious from carbon dioxide buildup before he makes it halfway across the channel.”

J
uan moved with furious, single-minded purpose. His injury hampered him a little, but the pain was only a minor distraction—someone else’s pain now, set aside. He had no time to indulge it.

His mind was ice clear and laser focused. The seconds crawled slowly by as he coursed through the caverns with brutal speed, doing what he needed to do, every movement precise and sure.

He triggered the captive bolt gun again, shattering another strap, and yanked the tank of nitrous oxide away from the column of rock. Carrying it under one arm, he scooped up a propane tank with his other hand. The weight of his load now balanced, he exited the gallery.

Hurried strides took him across the smaller room. As he passed Brent’s desk he glanced at the monitors:

LIVE TRANSMISSION

8:32… 8:33… 8:34…

Juan didn’t look at the scuba rebreather as he went by. It lay on the floor next to the desk, where he had dropped it.

And where it would stay.

Speeding down the tunnel, he paralleled the crack in the floor that ran along the wall. He could see the gleam of water below. He reached the point where the crack grew wide enough and, without hesitating, threw both metal tanks into the fissure. They clanged against the rocky sides, sliding into the water to come to rest two meters below the surface, atop a growing pile of gray, green, and blue cylinders.

He turned and plunged back through the tunnel, the hard rubber soles of his booties slapping against the floor.

Reentering the gallery, he picked up the bolt gun and moved to the next column. Already he had cleared all the tanks within fifteen meters of the gallery entrance. But there were so many more.

He knew he wouldn’t get them all before Brent realized what he was doing, or simply decided it was time to bring things to an end. But maybe, just maybe, he could remove enough to make a difference—to give the others a fighting chance to live.

Camilla thought he had abandoned her to die. Even if he succeeded here, she would never know he hadn’t.

But Juan had known that he couldn’t warn them. A warning would have killed them all. Brent would have detonated the trap as soon as they tried to run.

Carrying two more tanks, he rushed down the tunnel again, passing the monitor:

9:14… 9:15… 9:16…

He had to go farther this time, because the crack was filling with tanks. He needed them deep enough to protect them from the coming explosion. Reaching the pool at the end, next to the chain capstan, he threw the tanks he carried into the water. Then he spun on his heel and plunged back up the tunnel.

He coughed, spitting blood. But he never slowed his pace, forcing himself onward relentlessly. If he was fast enough now, maybe he could save them. Maybe not.

Either way, he would never know.

Juan did know one thing with absolute, cold certainty, though.

His journey beneath the island was a one-way trip.

M
ason looked at Camilla’s huddled form and felt a little concerned. Dmitry knelt beside her, speaking to her in soothing tones. He laid a hand on her shoulder, but she pulled away from him, curling tighter. Mason was reasonably certain she would be okay, but he wasn’t quite sure how to help her right now, so instead, he pulled out Brent’s phone.

Curious, he tapped the touch screen. The pass-code lock was gone. In its place, he saw a miniature version of the familiar scoreboard, scaled down from what they had seen on the monitors in the houses. Mason tapped his own name a few times and grinned as his score increased.

“There’s an app for that?” He tilted the screen toward Brent and chuckled. “
Now
we know why you always had your hands in your vest pockets.”

He swiped the screen with two fingers, and the scoreboard slid aside to reveal a grid of smaller video windows. A string of text ran below them.

LIVE TRANSMISSION… 11:26… 11:27… 11:28…

In one of the small windows, Mason could see himself, with Brent hanging over his shoulder like a big silver-headed scarecrow in a black wet suit.

In another, JT and Veronica circled in the depths of the cistern, fighting. Mason shook his head, amused. The rocuronium would have worn off half an hour ago because Juan had stopped him from leaving to redose Veronica. Now she was on the loose again. He had no doubt she would kill JT. He would have to find another way to subdue her without killing her, so they could spend some quality time together. He found Veronica very exciting.

“Mason…” Camilla’s ragged voice drew his attention. She sat up partway, still hunched over, her back rising and falling in rapid breaths. “Kill him.” Her head stayed bowed, hair hanging in her face. “For me.”

He couldn’t see her expression.

“That’s what you want?” he asked.

“Just kill him,” she said.

He grinned. “You don’t have to ask
me
twice.”

He pulled out a knife, flipped it open. Lowering the phone to put it in his pocket, he caught new movement in a third window on the screen: a wet suit-clad figure racing down a tunnel.

Mason’s eyes widened. It was Juan, carrying two bulky cylinders under his arms, moving faster than Mason had ever seen him move before. Juan threw the cylinders into a pool of water and disappeared back up the tunnel.

“Kill him.
Right. Now.
” Camilla’s chest heaved with contractions. “Or
I’ll
do it.”

“Sh-h-h.” Raising a hand for silence, Mason focused intently on the phone screen. Juan was back with two more cylinders.

Watching him, Mason sucked in a breath.

Tanks of gas. Directly below them right now. A timer counting off seconds.

Sliding the phone into his pocket, he took off for the door in a limping run.

He glanced over his shoulder. Dmitry was staring at him with a shocked expression. Camilla scrambled to her feet.

Mason shouted, “Run!” and plunged through the doorway.

Behind them all, hanging from the wheel with his arms stretched wide, Brent smiled. Raising his voice, he intoned the words with slow gravitas:

“Consummatum est.”

J
uan tossed two tanks—green oxygen and blue ether—into the pool. He turned away from the water, and a warm breeze blew his hair back from his forehead. A rumble shook the floor beneath his feet, growing in intensity.

His time had run out.

The far end of the tunnel glowed with orange light, brighter and brighter, racing toward him.

A roaring filled his ears.

Juan relaxed. He stood up straight, facing the oncoming glow, resolute and calm.

He had done everything he could; he only wished he could have done more. But maybe it was enough. Maybe Camilla and the others had a chance now.

He closed his eyes as the world around him exploded in flame and fury.

A
rumble shook the fog signal building, throwing Camilla to her knees.

It felt like an earthquake.

Above her, Brent leaned his head back against the spoke of the great metal wheel. The floor at the far side of the building gave way. The rows of old machinery collapsed into the flaming void that yawned below, dropping like a row of dominoes as the floor unzipped beneath them. The block of machinery that Brent was tied to tilted backward, lifting him up and away from her to drop from sight.

She screamed. The section of floor beneath her tilted forty-five degrees, sending her sliding toward the gaping hole that Brent had disappeared through. To her right, the west wall of the factory building caved in, crumbling as the island’s surface collapsed beneath it. Billowing gouts of blue and orange flame shot upward on both sides of her.

Clinging to the canted flooring, she hung on desperately, her feet kicking in empty space. Thirty feet away from her, Dmitry stood on an unstable section of flooring, trying to keep his footing. Flames rose around him, and his eyes, wide with terror, met hers. Balancing on the sagging floorboards, he looked just as he had out on the water, crouched on the fragment of the Orca’s rear deck, waiting for the great white’s strike.

She clutched the splintered wood and pulled herself forward. Dragging her legs up onto the broken, tilting section of floor, she crawled toward Dmitry.

But this time, there was no pressure wave to warn him. The flooring beneath him collapsed with brutal suddenness, and he fell screaming into the flames below.

Camilla turned her face away from a jet of fire that roared up through a gap in the boards.

All around her, the building groaned like a dying ship.

Something huge gave way in the depths underneath, shaking the whole island. The entire factory building dropped several feet, bouncing Camilla against the floorboards, hurting her ribs and shaking her grip loose. She slid toward the gaping pit.

As she rolled off the edge she caught a broken floor beam and clung to it, hanging by her arms now. She glanced down between her flailing sneakers, seeing hungry darkness and patches of flame below. On every side, the edges of the pit were crumbling away, dropping into the hole, widening it.

Another violent groan above her. She looked up.

The building’s massive roof beams shifted and sagged against one another, collapsing in on themselves. She screamed, hurting her throat.

The section of flooring she hung from broke free. Camilla fell into the darkness below.

The roof came down, and the whole building collapsed into the void on top of her, shutting out the light.

T
he floor of the cistern shook violently beneath JT’s feet. Then it dropped away, collapsing into a shifting, tumbling rock slide. He covered his head with his arms, tumbling amid the debris and coming to rest in an uneven pile of broken concrete. The floor of the cistern now sloped away into darkness.

Veronica was somewhere nearby—the collapse would have caught her as well. But the gap at the bottom of the tilted floor drew his eye.

Flames danced and glimmered in the black void below, as if the earth had split to reveal a glimpse of hell.

JT stared at it. “What the fuck?”

Closer by, something moved weakly in the shadows. Tensing, he prepared to defend himself.

“JT, I’m trapped. Help me,” Veronica’s voice commanded.

A pile of rubble covered her legs and stomach. Her hands shoved at the rocks, trying to push them off her body like a heavy quilt. Then she stopped moving. There was a lot of blood.

“I think I’m dying here.” She sounded matter-of-fact about it. “My back is broken.”

She coughed. “Oh shit. I’m cold, JT.”

The ground wasn’t stable. The broken floor of the cistern trembled under him. He knew that it could shift or give way at any moment. He looked up at the bright circle of light from the cistern’s entrance—the rim of the crumbling dome. It lay farther above now than before.

Veronica’s voice changed.

“I’m so cold…” Scared now.

A billowing column of smoke and gray dust rose outside, eclipsing one side of the circle of brightness. It climbed higher and higher, expanding into a mushroom shape that blotted out the sky. Its shadow fell across him…

…like the smoke rising from a crashed helicopter. In his mind, he could hear his squadmates’ voices once again: DiMarco’s shouts, Collins’s groans. Sanchez, whispering,
Tengo que volver a mi madre, ella está enferma… ayúdame…

JT shook his head, chasing the distraction away. He stared up at the opening to the cistern. He knew he could make it, but he had to hurry.

He crawled upslope. Julian’s ribcage cracked apart under his weight, releasing its squirming cargo of green and orange bloodworms onto the rocks beneath him.

He pictured the stunned betrayal on Sanchez’s face, watching him sling the pack over his uninjured shoulder, the broken fragments of the IFF beacon still embedded in his boot sole. The kid hadn’t been praying anymore.