Phoenix Island (39 page)

Stark smiled. “Gratitude is a societal commodity. Men like us deal in realities.” He took a step forward.

Carl edged closer to the end of the pier. Behind him, sharks still splashed.

Stark advanced slowly. “Son.”

Carl snapped a jab into Stark’s chin. “Don’t call me that.”

Stark laughed, making a show of rubbing his chin. “Nice strike, son. But let’s stop this foolishness.” He offered his hand. “Come with me. I’m giving you another chance.”

Carl stepped back, nearing the edge of the dock. His only chance was to trick Stark into charging him, then slip under his attack, so that Stark went off the dock into the water, into the sharks. “Come on,” he said, beckoning.

Stark stepped toward him. “The orphans will be flabbergasted. Carl
Freeman, returned from the dead, resurrected, larger than life, standing at the right hand of his father.”

“You’re not my father,” Carl said. He flicked out another jab. Stark batted it away.

“I could be your father. We are both warriors. We’re stronger than these others. Better. Come back with me, and we’ll rule over them together.”

“And then what? Send suicide bombers to Vegas? Assassinate the president? Set off a nuke at Disney?”

Stark’s smile widened. “It would be a start.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Perhaps. But if I am, it’s merely one more trait that you and I share.”

Carl spat blood. “Yeah, right. I’m not crazy.”

“No? What’s all this about then? Why fight your destiny, son? What do you owe the world? What do you owe these orphans? Why do you insist on denying your own talent? And why would you sacrifice a brilliant future for some silly girl? It boggles the mind. It truly does. Forget it, and so will I. You’re forgiven. Here, take my hand, and we’ll put it all behind us.” As Stark spoke, he inched closer.

Carl feinted with a jab and drilled his battered right hand into Stark’s chest. It was like punching a boulder. Pain shot all the way to his shoulder.

Stark tsk-tsked and shook his head, as if losing patience with a temperamental toddler.

Carl teetered at the edge. Sharks thrashed loudly in the water.

Stark stepped closer.

Keep coming,
Carl thought.
Just a few more steps.

“Come to me in peace,” Stark said, “and one day you will inherit my throne.”

“No,” Carl said.

Stark spread his arms. “If you wish to die in obscurity rather than rise to greatness, the choice is yours. But really . . . what’s your next move? Forward, into the sharks? No—suicide isn’t your style. What, then? Think maybe you could draw me out, make
me
fall into the
sharks? The matador and the charging bull? That trick might work on Parker—the man’s a baboon—but I hope I’ve earned enough respect for you to know it would never work on me. That leaves only one way: straight down the middle.”

Stark fell into his loose fighting stance and beckoned him forward.

Disappointment crashed down on Carl like a great stone. Of course Stark had known . . . it was pointless. He was finished. So be it. At least he’d go down fighting. “All right, then.” He wiped blood from his cut eye and spat on the planks between them. “I got something for you.” He raised his fists and shuffled forward.

“That’s the spirit!” Stark said.

Carl feinted with his jab and drove a kick toward Stark’s knee.

Stark twisted, Carl’s kick missed its target, and then Stark was on him. Carl hammered hooks into the giant’s ribs, but Stark wrapped Carl’s head and arm into a lock and twisted his upper body.

Carl’s feet left the ground, his legs swung high, and his entire body spun like a clock hand racing backward. For a fraction of an instant, he reversed in the air, head nearest the dock, legs pointed skyward. Then his body cracked like a whip, and Stark smashed him into the planking.

He lay shattered on the pier. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. Stark adjusted his lock slightly, and Carl felt his own arm squeeze against his neck.

Stark said, “I’m sorry it has to end like this, son, I really am. Perhaps your spirit will take the chip further, get us closer to our goal. Onward, progress, onward.”

Carl had just enough time to panic—they were going to chip him, turn him into a zombie—then Stark squeezed, cutting off the blood flow, and Carl’s vision grew strange. Darkness framed blue sky, then tightened until it was like looking down a long, dark tunnel, the sky a mere blue dot at its end. The tunnel closed, the sky winked out, and darkness claimed him.

W
HEN OCTAVIA COULD NO LONGER
walk, they lifted her between them—Parker taking her cuffed wrists, Decker holding her lashed ankles—and carried her into the Chop Shop. Over the span of a life that had dealt her no end of misery, she’d never felt such pain, weakness, and hopelessness. She sagged between them, limp as a corpse and wishing only that death would wash her away from all this suffering and injustice into a blissful nothingness. Tragedy had driven her beyond hope and, mercifully, beyond terror, as well . . . or so she believed until, at the end of the hospital corridor, they dropped her just inside a white room.

Misery returned at the sight of him.

Carl, Carl, Carl . . .

He lay still as a corpse on a table at the center of the room. Blood dripped from the table’s edge to a puddle on the floor.

All for her. All because he’d tried to save her.

She tried to scream but found only a moan.

A bearded man in spectacles and a white lab coat stood over her friend, speaking to someone she couldn’t see.

“Woo-ee!” Parker said. “You don’t look so hot, Hollywood!”

“What did you say?” a deep voice said, and Stark came through a door on the opposite side of the room.

Parker tried to smile. It looked like he had a stomachache. “I didn’t mean anything.”

“You didn’t
mean anything
?” Stark said. He gestured toward Carl.
“He was the finest soldier to ever come here, and look what you made me do to him!”

Parker raised his hands, palms out. “Hold on now, Commander. You told me to push him. Told me that before he even got here.”

“Push, yes,” Stark said, “but you’re too stupid to understand the difference between pushing someone and trying to break him.”

Parker snorted. “Shoot, if I wanted to, I would’ve broke him like a promise.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.” Stark’s arm flashed out, and across the room, Parker grunted and gurgled. He staggered backward with his hands to his throat, crashed into a wall, and slid to the floor. His hands pushed away from his throat, and something clattered across the floor and came to rest a few feet from Octavia’s face: a slender knife, red with blood.

So quickly she hadn’t even seen it happen, Stark had drawn a knife, whipped it across the room, and sunk the blade in Parker’s throat.

Parker gasped and thrashed. His hands pressed to his throat again, but they couldn’t stop the fountain of blood, which just sprayed up from between his fingers. The drill sergeant’s mouth worked wordlessly, and his eyes bulged, staring at Carl, as if trying to understand how one boy could have brought all this down on him. The fountain guttered. Parker began to twitch.

Octavia looked away.

There were more sounds, then silence, and when she looked back at Parker, he was obviously dead.

About which she felt nothing.

Bending over the corpse, Stark said, “Some people can’t be broken.” He reached inside the dead man’s collar, yanked hard, and came away holding something shiny dangling from ribbon: a gold medal. “Proceed, Doctor.”

Shaking visibly, the doctor glanced at Parker’s corpse. “With all due respect, Commander, would it not be wise to use the coma and wait for the new
cheep
to be ready?”

Stark stared at Carl.

The doctor glanced at her and at Decker, who was sidling out of the
room, then said, “Would it not be wise to test first on a patient less
importante
?”

“No,” Stark said. “I won’t keep him like some kind of plant. Fate will decide the matter. Operate.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “In time. But with all due respect, Commander, all people have the limit. We should give the boy his chances, especially since he is so close to perfection for this. Use the coma, let him heal.
Then
let fate decide.”

Stark stared at Carl. “How long?”

“Is hard to say,” the doctor said, tugging at his beard. “Two weeks, maybe three.”

For a moment, no one spoke. Then Stark said, “All right. Fix him. I’ll want daily updates. Morning and night.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Stark started pacing. “I won’t watch the operation—I’ve seen him suffer too much already—but you’ll keep me informed every step of the way.”

“Yes, of course, Commander.”

Then Stark stopped pacing, seeing Octavia for the first time. His face twisted with anger. “You,” he said, and swept the bloody knife from the floor.

Octavia cringed against the wall. She wanted her suffering to end, but not like this. . . .

His hand slipped under her chin and cupped her jaw, squeezing. The blade descended, and she felt its edge, sticky with Parker’s blood, against her cheek.

She forced herself to look him in the eyes. “Just do it, you psycho. Just get it over with and do it.”

“Oh, no,” he said, and his smile was terrible. “Death would be far too merciful for you.”

“Go to hell.”

His smile broadened. “Actually, you’re headed there now. It’s just down the hall. Doctor, once Carl is situated, would you like to make some music with this other little one here?”

“Oh . . . yes, Commander,” the doctor moaned. “Yes, very much.”

And for as terrible as Stark’s smile was, it was nothing compared to the eagerness that shuddered through the doctor.

Octavia had to bite her lip just to keep from screaming.

“Excellent,” Stark said, withdrawing the blade. “Make her beg for death every day, but do not give it to her. Don’t let the symphony end. She may still prove of use to us.”

Biting down even harder, she thought,
Don’t scream. Don’t beg. No matter what they say or do, don’t give them the satisfaction
.

O
CTAVIA DID BEG
—first for mercy, then for death—every day, every hour, every minute, until she could no longer form words in her mouth or mind.

By the time, three weeks later, that Dr. Vispera wheeled her back into the white room, however, she had slipped into a catatonic state. She sat rigidly in the wheelchair, a wasted shell of herself, and saw but did not see Carl spread upon the table beneath bright lights, smelled but did not smell the sharp scent of alcohol, heard but did not hear the slow, steady beat of the heart monitor or the doctor who spoke to his assistant, “Give me the orbitoclast.”

The young man in pale green hospital scrubs selected what looked like an ice pick from a tableside cart cluttered with medical instruments and handed it to the doctor.

Dr. Vispera held the tapered wand aloft, as if demonstrating for med students. He leaned over Carl. “I insert the point between the eyelid and the eye. There. It rests against the upper eye socket.”

The heart monitor beeped steadily.

“Now the mallet,” the doctor said, and the assistant handed him a small hammer.

The doctor lifted a mallet into the air. “I tap the orbitoclast . . .” He leaned over Carl again, and Octavia, mercifully lost within herself, heard but did not hear three sickening taps followed by a cracking sound. “. . . opening the small hole in the skull.”

The electronic beep of the heart monitor quickened.

The assistant glanced in the machine’s direction.

“Yes,
muchacho
,” Dr. Vispera said, returning the tools to his wide-eyed assistant. “Sweat now. Sweat. I think if the beeping stops, you and I are food for sharks.” He gave the boy a ghastly smile. “Give me the injection probe.”

The assistant handed him something that looked like a clear plastic pistol with a thin barrel that tapered to a point. Dr. Vispera leaned over Carl again. “I enter through the perforation and insert the probe five centimeters into the frontal lobe to plant the
cheep
in the connective fibers between the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex. I squeeze the trigger.”