New Year Island (79 page)

The swirling dust cloud shifted above the cistern. A narrow ray of sunlight broke through, painting JT’s face with its warmth.

He had to go
now.

“Don’t leave me down here,” Veronica said behind him. “I don’t want to die all alone.”

Then she coughed out a small laugh of resignation. “Oh, never mind. I forgot who I was talking to.”

Aw, hell…
JT closed his eye and stopped moving. For long seconds, he stayed that way, locked in a silent struggle with himself. The opening beckoned from above, pulling him. He felt as if he were being torn in two. Then he relaxed, shoulders sagging. Veronica was a psychotic nightmare, but she was no coward. She had her own strange sense of duty and honor. He couldn’t spend the rest of his life knowing that he had deserved even
her
contempt.

The momentary opening in the dust cloud shrank shut again, and the ray of light dwindled and died. With one last glance at the darkening circle of sky, he turned and crawled back to where Veronica lay bleeding.

Her eyes, huge and luminous in the darkness, fixed on his face. Her body relaxed.

“I didn’t mean what I said.” Her breathing seemed to ease, too. “You’re still a good-looking kid.”

He reached out and brushed the bloody hair from her forehead. She shivered.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me, why I am the way I am,” she said. “But I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore. For whatever it’s worth, I’m sorry. For everything.”

Her breath caught. “I tried, JT. I really tried. I wanted to do something good, you know? It wasn’t easy, given how I am. But I found a way to help. To make the world a little better for some.”

He realized she was talking about her work. Her women’s shelter.

She groped for his hand. He let her take it.

Her voice turned uncertain. “I
think
I made a difference.”

“That’s the most we can hope for,” he said.

“So cold, JT. Just hold me.” Trembling, she laughed a broken version of her sultry laugh. “Sorry, that’s pretty cliché, huh?”

Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing on him. He put his other arm around her and settled into a reclining position beside her.

Lowering her head to his chest, she lay still. “I guess there’s no money, then,” she whispered.

He laughed even though it hurt. “No, I guess there isn’t.”

Veronica purred a little laugh, too. “What a waste this all was, then. What a terrible, terrible waste.”

She curled tighter against his chest, shivering.

Shifting to a more comfortable position, JT stroked her hair.

His gaze wandered back to the darkened circle of sky. But it seemed impossibly far now.

S
omewhere in the orange-lit dimness that surrounded Camilla, a man screamed in agony.

Dmitry.
He was hurt. She had to help him.

She sat up, bumping her head. Miraculously, other than bruises and scrapes from head to toe, she herself seemed to be uninjured. Blinking, she looked around in the light of the flickering flames.

A maze of broken rock and concrete surrounded her beneath a low, uneven ceiling. Cramped, narrow passages ran away from her in several directions, winding between crushed machinery and fallen beams.

Camilla’s breath caught. She
recognized
her surroundings.

“This isn’t happening.” Her own adult voice sounded strange to her ears. “It isn’t real.”

Invisible spiders crawled over her scalp. The skin on her arms tightened, twisting into gooseflesh. Twenty-three years fell away in a heartbeat, disappearing into darkness.

Orange fire flickered nearby, lighting a curved metal surface beside her. It looked like the side panel of a car. She jammed a fist into her mouth, biting her knuckles to keep from screaming. A terrible, trapped keening noise rose from her throat instead. The hair on the back of her neck prickled and stood up.

Pulling her hand away from her mouth, she tried to crawl and started shuddering. Uncontrollably. Her teeth chattered.

She inched forward on her hands and knees, arms and legs shaking so violently they banged against the uneven walls and piled rubble.

Dmitry’s screams multiplied.

They were joined by other screams, moans, and sobs from all sides, echoing through the rocky maze: the voices of men, women, children.

Not real… not real… not real not real not real notrealnotrealnotreal…

By the orange light of the fires, she could see cars now.

Crushed cars.

W
aves crashed over the low boulder, depositing something new on top. The crab scuttled forward, investigating the large inert shape sprawled across the wet rock. It crawled over the curved black surface, not liking the firm, spongy texture beneath its walking legs, but intent on reaching the pink, starfish-shaped object at the end: food.

The crab squeezed beneath the fleshy projections that curled up from the food shape, and crawled into the center of the pinkness. With its mandibular palps, it tasted the ragged flesh at the base of one of the projections. The food was too firm, the meat too fresh, but the crab was hungry. It tore away a larger piece with its claws and used its palps to guide the meat into its mouth.

The pink food shape twitched.

Alarmed, the crab tried to scramble for safety but the pink projections curled inward to tighten around its shell, crushing it.

• • •

Juan’s fingers opened, trembling, and the next wave washed the crab out of his palm. He rolled onto his back.

Every part of his body hurt. He coughed up a stream of bloody water. His head pulsed and throbbed with pain. When he inhaled, only one side of his chest filled with air. The injured lung had collapsed, he knew. It felt heavy with fluid.

Sharp, piercing pain spiked the insides of his ears, like the ears of a novice diver who had failed to equalize correctly. Water foamed white on the rocks, inches from his cheek, and drained away: a wave crashing in eerie silence.

He should have heard it.

He couldn’t hear anything.

Juan touched his ear and winced, pulling away fingers tipped with blood. His eardrums were ruptured. He would never scuba dive again. But he was alive. He shouldn’t be—he had no idea how he had survived the explosion. But somehow he was still alive.

Grinning, he blinked up at the bright blue sky, not wanting to move.
Alive.
It was enough to lie here in blissful animal contentment…

Camilla. Dmitry. JT. Mason.

The grin fell away from his face.

A galvanizing jolt of adrenaline surged through his limbs. Hurling himself to his feet, he stood, dizzy and swaying, on the table-size boulder’s surface. His vision doubled and blurred. He squinted, seeing only ocean surrounding the wet rock where he stood.

He spun 180 degrees about, to face the island, which lay a hundred yards away. A channel of churning white boiled the water in a broad line stretching toward the rock where Juan stood. Steam rose from its surface. Debris floated along its length.

Juan’s eyes followed the path of churning whitewater back to the island, and horror engulfed him like a smothering blanket. His legs buckled, and he dropped to his hands and knees. Sucking in a one-sided breath, he shook his drooping head from side to side.

He had failed. They were all dead.

He gagged and vomited, spraying seawater and blood across the rocks.

Throwing his head back, he stared at the island. A towering gray mushroom cloud rose from its surface, where the fog signal buildings once stood. The billowing column of dust hung motionless in the air, dwarfing the island below. It doubled and swayed in Juan’s unsteady vision. Beneath the cloud, the surface of the island had caved in. A brand-new valley stretched inland from the shore, indenting the bluffs like the rut of a giant motorcycle tire in mud.

The fog signal buildings that had housed the science station were gone, swallowed up by the collapse.

While he watched, kneeling, a crack in the earth widened. It zigzagged from the waterline up the hill in a path of collapsing ground, racing toward the cistern. The rim of the cistern’s dome fell in, disappearing into the hole in awful silence and sending up another cloud of dust.

Sole survivor.

He gagged in horror. His stomach heaved.

Please not this.
Anything
but this. Not again.

The mushroom cloud rose overhead, ridiculing his failure. Mocking him for still being alive to see it.

He pushed himself to his feet and swayed, the damage to his inner ears throwing off his balance.

Juan threw himself forward in a dive.

Ears throbbing with agony, he surfaced, already swimming hard toward the island.

JT
coughed. His legs hurt. He looked at the blocks of broken concrete that had tumbled onto his shins from the collapsing cistern dome, trapping him.

Veronica shifted in his arms. She lay panting on top of him, chest to chest, as clouds of dust rose around them.

Their eyes met.

A torrent of cold water poured into the cistern through the zigzagging channel that now connected their sunken prison with the sea. The cold water churned around their ankles, rising fast over their knees, their waists… their chests. JT strained against the weight of the concrete rubble holding him down, but couldn’t budge.

Game over. They were fucked.

Veronica relaxed in his arms and closed her eyes.

He kept his eye open as the water rose over their heads, chilling his cheeks. To his surprise, Veronica raised her face toward him and pressed her open lips against his in a sensual underwater kiss.

He let himself relax.

In the green-lit water, Veronica’s luminous eyes suddenly opened wide. They glanced at the surface above, then focused on him with frightening predatory intensity.

JT’s surprise turned to terror as she sucked in a deep breath, draining the air from his lungs.

J
uan scrambled ashore and stood at the mouth of the broken valley. Its sunken floor stretched away from him, toward the center of the island. Gray dust filled the air, a uniform haze that reduced visibility to a few meters. Fires burned in patches, dimly glimpsed through the gray. Injured and dying seals flopped and shuddered on the rocks around him. Dust coated their fur like flour, turning them into silent, bloody ghosts.

Stepping over seal carcasses and debris, Juan walked up the valley, pushing deeper into the swirling grayness. He seemed to move very slowly, almost drifting, as if underwater. The eerie silence made it dreamlike and surreal.

The ground rose ahead of him in staggered, broken steps. Walls of shattered rock sloped upward on each side to merge with the plateau five meters above. Thirty meters in, he came to a dead end: a tumbled wall of steel I-beams, shattered concrete and wood, and broken machinery—the wreckage of the fog signal building.

The sight of it confirmed his worst fears. Most of the building had fallen into the cavern below. The devastation was total.

Picking up a head-size chunk of concrete, he tossed it aside, causing a mini landslide. He ignored the falling rocks, clearing as much rubble as he could move. The collapsed lung made it hard to keep his breath, and soon, despite the extraordinary capacity his free-dive training gave him, he was panting.

Small gaps he had exposed between the larger chunks of debris gaped black. He moved his hand in front of them, testing them, until he felt the movement of air.

Placing his hands on a massive beam, he leaned forward, peering through the crack into the darkness. He could see the faint orange glow of distant fires inside. He smelled smoke.

“Can anybody hear me?” he shouted.

But how would he hear them reply? He had heard himself, though. His voice sounded muffled and indistinct, like he was underwater.

Bone conduction. Even without eardrums, he could still hear his own voice because it vibrated through the bones of his skull. It gave him an idea.

Laying his head against the metal beam, he shouted again, then closed his eyes and concentrated. Did he hear a distant scrabbling of rocks—someone moving in there? A voice, barely audible? He wasn’t sure.

Something soft hit him in the face, clawing and shaking.

Juan opened his eyes to see a hand poking out of the gap between the beam and a massive chunk of concrete. A female hand. He could hear rhythmic, high-pitched sounds now, coming through the beam.

Camilla.
She was alive.

He sagged against the steel as relief loosened his limbs.

Her hand crawled over his face, groping blindly, exploring. He took it in both of his own, and held her wrist against his forehead. Bone conduction. He could hear her now, although he had trouble making out the words.

Her arm shuddered in his hands. “Oh god,” he heard her say. “Get me out of here. You need to get me out of here right now!”

Maybe it was his damaged ears, but Camilla’s voice sounded wrong, wavering up and down the octaves. She sounded
younger
.

Juan looked at the massive beams and fallen slabs of concrete that plugged the end of the valley. They were packed so tight even a moray eel would have trouble finding a way through.

He slapped the beam between them. “We’d need a bulldozer to clear this.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I can’t be in here right now. I just
can’t
.”

“Are you all right?”

“No.”—a ragged trill that might have been a laugh or a sob. “I’m nowhere even close to all right.”

Her hand pulled free from his. The fingers stretched, reaching, clawing at the open air. He could picture her, frantically pushing herself against the other side of the wreckage, as if she could squeeze through the narrow gap.

He trapped her hand again, as gently as he could, and held it against his cheekbone. “I’m sorry, Camilla. I’m trying to think of something.”