Phoenix Island (36 page)

When he came to a storm-twisted clearing in the trees, he paused, bending over and pretending to be far more tired than he was. He wanted them to see him, wanted them to keep pushing in his direction rather than looping back past Octavia. Sure enough, he’d paused only a few seconds when shouting rose up at him.

Then a rifle shot cracked through the air, and a bullet whined off a nearby rock. He sprawled onto the stony ground just as a spray of lead chewed the trees overhead. Scrambling uphill, he escaped the clearing and passed once more into the relative cover of the forest. More gunfire rattled from below, but Carl knew they had little chance of seeing him, let alone hitting him, now that he was in the trees again.

Gunfire meant Phoenix Forcers. They had been receiving the same treatments he’d been given. Some of them could run as quickly as he could, some probably faster. And they hadn’t passed sleepless nights, then sprinted up and down mountainsides carrying someone in their arms.

He couldn’t outrun them. Not indefinitely. Not them or their guns.

At last, the trees thinned, and he crested the steep slope and found
himself at the lower edge of the long ridge of stone that ran like an exposed spine across the center of island. With the first twinges of exhaustion starting to pop like fireworks in his thigh muscles, he sprinted into the open. From this high vantage point, he heard what sounded like a thousand voices closing in.

The stony ridge was perhaps ten feet wide. To its left, the ground sheered away into open air, a window onto the lower canopy ten stories below. Its empty vastness made him feel wobbly.

He glanced to the right, looking for the trailhead of the steep path he and Stark had used, and—

“There he is!”

They rushed up the hill, looking like hunters out of the Stone Age, six shirtless boys carrying spears. For a second, he recognized none of them, partly because mud was smeared like war paint on their faces but more so because of the faces themselves, which were so twisted with savage bloodlust, they looked more like animals than the boys he’d once known.

“Aaiiaii!” someone—Fay, Carl thought—cried as he threw his spear.

It was so abrupt, their breaking from the woods, that Carl had frozen, and by the time he saw the spear coming at him, it almost skewered his face. Fortunately, his years of boxing saved him. Out of instinct, he jerked his head to the right, like he was dipping away from a fast jab, and the shaft of the weapon tickled past his ear.

It would’ve killed him.

There was no place to run. There were six of them, five with spears, the sixth—and yes, Carl saw, it was Fay, who’d always seemed kind of timid but now looked like a starving wolf running down its prey—drew a big knife from his belt. They were less than thirty feet away, charging fast. The ridge was an open, rocky path; whether he ran forward or backward, they would cut him off.

“You’re dead, Hollywood!” someone yelled.

Carl turned from them, and the world pulsed in and out of focus. The sheer cliff plunged away to the jagged boulders piled at its base. Beyond that was forest.

Something thumped into his shoulder. For a second, even as he registered
the spear falling away into the void and the sensations of warmth and wetness and pain springing to the surface of his shoulder, he teetered on the edge of the cliff, filled with terror as he pin-wheeled his arms to keep from tumbling over the edge.

He caught his balance just in time to dodge another spear, which flashed past him, arched out over the cliff, and disappeared into the canopy far below.

“Hold your spears!” one of the kids said—it was Biscoe, Carl saw, and a memory flashed through his mind, Biscoe standing beside his bunk, laughing at Ross’s impersonation of Parker, tears running from his eyes—“Use them to stab!”

They were twenty feet away. He could never beat them all, not the way they were armed. . . .

No way out, no escape.

“Spears in front!” Biscoe commanded. “Knives move in from behind. Push him off the cliff.”

But Carl beat them to it.

He ran three steps and leapt into the void.

T
HEIR SCREAMS OF SURPRISE
ripped away behind him as his body rushed toward the treetops, adrenaline slowing the moment, giving him time to think, absurdly enough, how like a movie all this was. How the desperate hero evaded certain death by throwing himself from some great height—a cliff or bridge or airplane. Only, in the movies, the heroes jumped into
water. . . .

Not Carl.

He slapped into the leaves of the upper canopy first, slammed into something hard, and screamed when whatever it was, tree trunk or limb—he didn’t know up from down in this tumbling green moment—smashed his ribs like a giant fist. Falling again, he spun in the open air, his thoughts reduced to a string of exclamation points as he grabbed wildly at branches, everything around him a green blur veined in cracks of sunshine gleaming through the upper reaches. His hands raked past branch and bark but couldn’t find purchase. He felt a fingernail peel away, plummeted in a terrifying free fall, clipped his shin on something hard as steel, and grabbed a smaller branch, which bent with the force of his fall.

The branch burned his hand, but he held tight, even when his body jerked hard, and it felt like his shoulder might rip from its socket. Then the branch snapped away, and he was falling again. He managed to keep his feet under him and bent his knees as he slammed into the forest floor.

His legs took most of the impact. He tried to roll with it but hit his shoulder hard against the ground. He lay for a second, hurting. His ribs
were almost certainly broken. One shoulder felt dislocated, while the other bled moderately, sliced by the spear. His hand burned, a red line ripped raw across the palm where he’d seized the branch. His shin throbbed, and his ankle pulsed with pain. Despite all this, a rush of joy filled him with pure elation—he’d nearly died, but he was alive, alive, alive!—and he struggled to his feet.

He’d done it. He’d jumped off a cliff, smashed through trees, and survived the drop to the jungle floor. He lifted his fists skyward and thanked God for this slice of amazing luck.

Above him, all was green shadow. He could hear the boys far up above hooting and laughing, no doubt thinking he’d killed himself.

Good,
he thought.
Let them think that
.

He turned his back on the cliff and took a second to get his bearings. Far off to the left, Octavia waited. Straight ahead, through a wide span of heavy, unfamiliar forest, was the ocean. He needed to push in that direction but angle right. Eventually, he would come to the beach, and if his sense of direction were intact, he’d end up just outside Camp Phoenix Force. His only hope was that the Phoenix Forcers had abandoned camp for the duel and then gone off into the forest, looking for him.

He limped into the unfamiliar forest.

The going was slower than he would have liked. He and Stark had never run this corner of the island, and he kept running into unexpected delays: a natural fence of boulders at the base of the central peak, a deadfall of wind-damaged trees, a veritable wall of thorn bushes. And, just below a stream where he paused to drink water and rest his aching body, a murky swamp buzzing with mosquitoes and stinging flies.

At last he found a narrow trail furrowed into the ground. Wherever the rough path split, he headed left toward the camp, and hopefully the boats and freedom.

When he came to the hillside clearing and heard grunting, he remembered why he and Stark had never traveled this section of the jungle.

A groan escaped his lips as uphill, where the clearing ended in a span of gloomy forest, dark shapes moved.

More grunting. A whistle. A squeal.

A big boar charged out of the trees, white tusks flashing.

Carl ran in the opposite direction.

The clearing ended just as he hit his stride, and he found himself flying through the air as the ground broke away, not to a sheer cliff but to a sparsely wooded hillside. He hit the ground running, fell, rolled, and, against all odds, popped up running again. Birds squawked loudly into the air, as if feeling the pain that raged through his battered body. Leaves and branches slapped into him as he hurtled downhill, expecting at any second to feel the boar’s tusk slash into his legs.

At last the ground leveled out again, and he realized the trees were thinning, that a wall of bright sunshine burned just ahead.

Some distance behind him, an angry squeal cut the air, and Carl turned to see the big boar waddling back uphill, looking dangerous and proud at having defended its territory.

Carl slowed to jog and then to a limp. Everything hurt.

Uphill, the pigs squealed and huffed but stayed over the rise, out of sight. It seemed they’d given up the chase. Of course they had; that was natural, wasn’t it? They were animals. They were vicious, sure, but this wasn’t personal. Their aggression was merely territorial. They weren’t so savage as
human
animals who went out in packs to hunt and kill their own kind.

He hobbled toward the light, hoping he wasn’t too far off course.

Reaching the forest’s edge, he felt like shouting. Across the sand directly in front of him ran a chain-link fence surrounding familiar-looking buildings. Overhead fluttered the black-and-red flag of Camp Phoenix Force.

He’d made it. He’d come out exactly where he needed to be.

And taking in the scene, squinting against the sun, he nearly did shout for joy.

The gate was wide open.

At first he couldn’t believe it.

He could see no one at all in the vicinity. Just a hundred yards of sand between him and the gate, not far beyond which, he knew, the boats marked on Eric’s map waited, bobbing in the water, unguarded.

It seemed impossible, this stroke of good luck . . . and yet the open
gate made sense. Everyone had gone off to watch him duel Parker—and now they were spread all over the island, hunting him.

He chuckled, crouching there in his sweat and pain, and swatted mosquitoes while he eyed the gate, making sure. He saw no movement.

Yes. At last things were going his way.

He slipped from the trees and started toward freedom.

He was halfway across the sand when someone with a rifle stepped into view.

C
ARL LURCHED TO A HALT,
spraying sand, turned, and sprinted back toward the forest.

The trees were so far away. It was a nightmare: running through the clutching sand, the trees impossibly distant, across a wide-open space. He pumped his arms and legs as hard as he could, a flat-out sprint across the sand. He heard the shouting and waited for the gunfire, knowing it would come, pushing his hardest toward the trees, waiting for the loud bark of the rifle, waiting for fists of lead to slam into his back and open great gaping holes out the front of him. He knew this was it, knew he was finished. . . .

Then gunfire did bark, and a line of bullets tore along the beach beside him, pitching fountains of sand into the air so close he felt the grit on his face. The forest drew nearer and nearer—twenty yards, ten—but the gun was firing again, and he could hear the bullets racing up the sand behind him—five yards now!—and a bullet punched him in the back and threw him off his feet into the tangled vegetation at the forest’s edge.

He was shot. They’d hit him.

Pain throbbed in his side, hurting like a hook to the body and a puncture wound all at the same time, and Carl was aware of blood everywhere. His blood. So much of it, on his shirt, on his arms, his hands, even on his face. He tasted blood, smelled it. Glancing down at his shirt, he saw a hole in the front, where the bullet had passed through him, and saw blood leaking down his stomach, down his leg.

More gunfire.

Bullets tore into the forest, thumping against trees, snickering through leaves, and pitching leaf litter into the air. One struck the tree just above his head and rained down splinters. Another ricocheted off a nearby rock with a frightening whine.

He scrambled deeper into the woods. The pain of the gunshot radiated through him, filling him from belt line to throat. It was difficult to breathe. Wild with fear and desperation, he pulled himself up the steep, slippery slope.