It wasn’t a horror-movie scream. It didn’t even last a full second. It was more of a startled gasp, really, or maybe a yelp. Completely involuntary on his part. But it was just enough that the thing that gripped him knew it found prey.
It tightened its grip and pushed into him. He felt it, but he couldn’t see it.
Jesus, where were its teeth?
What he did next was instinctive. He didn’t think anything through, didn’t plan, didn’t calculate. He just reacted. His arms were pinned to his side, so he kneed the thing in its groin and head-butted it in the face.
Only then did Parker realize the thing was shorter than him or he might have head-butted it right in the teeth.
It cried out in anger and pain and Parker shoved the thing down to the ground.
There was nothing he could do about what happened next.
It screamed.
If there was any doubt before about what their screams meant, there was not anymore. The sound had a perfectly clear and unambiguous purpose. It said,
Found prey
.
Parker stood. So much rain poured off his body that he felt heavy. He still couldn’t see, had no idea which direction he was facing, but he knew where that thing was. It was on the ground three feet in front of him. It screamed again and he kicked it in the face. He felt and heard a sickening crunch as its face broke. It flopped to the ground, silent.
He turned around, found the faint gray smudge of the sea in the distance, and ran. If he crashed into anything or anyone, he’d shove it aside or run right on over it.
He could not see the ground. Could not see his feet.
So he did not see the curb.
He didn’t go flying, exactly. His right foot just spun underneath him. He went up and then down.
He may as well have been hit by a bus. His abdomen slapped the ground like he’d just done a belly flop. Air exploded from his lungs. His stinging palms felt sandpapered. He tried to breathe and could not. He gasped for air, but his diaphragm and lungs refused to cooperate.
He heard footsteps in front of him and the faint sound of a human voice beneath the drum of the rain saying, “This way.” It sounded like Hughes, guiding the others.
Parker still couldn’t breathe. He got up onto his knees, but he still couldn’t breathe.
Everything stopped. He stopped hearing the rain, stopped feeling the wet and the cold, and completely forgot that those things were out there in the dark.
Because he couldn’t breathe.
Nothing else mattered until he could breathe. He keeled forward, desperate to draw breath, but he couldn’t.
He was going to suffocate.
But just as suddenly as he had stopped breathing, his lungs exploded with air. Parker took one gasping breath after another. He was not going to die on that sidewalk. Not if he got up and ran.
He stood again and felt like someone had stabbed an ice pick into his knee. His palms felt shredded to ribbons. He couldn’t run. Couldn’t walk without limping. He was just about done.
But he limped, dazed, certain he wouldn’t make it, but drowning now seemed better than being killed by one or more of those things. At least he wouldn’t turn into one of them.
The water was not far ahead of him. He heard splashing. His companions were wading in and pushing off toward the boat. He could see the water a little bit better as he got closer.
He heard Annie cry out, “I see the boat!”
Footsteps behind him. Footsteps moving fast. Running. Lots of them.
Screams behind him.
Those things knew where they were. Those things knew his companions were getting into the water.
Parker ran. He didn’t know how, but he did it. A switch flipped and the pain vanished from his knee, his hands, and his belly. He’d either make it to the water or die like a gazelle on the African Savannah in seconds.
He hit the water at full speed and it tripped him. Pinwheeled him forward and face-first into the sea. His injured knee slammed into a rock below the surface and the pain exploded again. He saw white flashes behind his eyes and felt his stomach leap up his throat, but he pushed himself into the dark water and swam ahead blindly.
Splashing behind him. Lots of splashing behind him. Those things had followed him in.
Why were they swimming? They didn’t jump in off the docks in Olympia, but
now
they were getting into the water?
He swam. Not properly the way he learned as a kid in the pool at the YMCA, just a frantic and panicked blind paddling scramble away from the shore. He was hyperventilating. He couldn’t help it. The adrenaline in his system reached its biological maximum. His heart pounded away like a hummingbird’s. He had to breathe fast and hard and deep and then even faster, but the water was almost ocean-like in its choppiness, and he got some in his mouth and his nose every time a wave swept into his face.
So much water washed over his head that he could no longer tell if he was above water or not. But he had to breathe, and he had to breathe fast, and he if he didn’t find the boat
now
he would drown.
He had no idea where it was. No idea any longer which way was the shore, so he slowed down and tried to stand on the bottom so he could fill his lungs and get his bearings, but his feet found no purchase. The sea had no bottom. He had swum too far, he was sinking, and he was going to drown. Those things were somewhere behind him, but he was going to drown.
But then his feet touched the bottom. He was submerged over his head, but his feet found the bottom, and he pushed upward as hard as he could, ignoring the explosive pain in his knee, and launched himself back toward the surface.
His face broke through and he gasped.
Go
. Just go. The boat has to be up ahead somewhere.
Annie’s voice cried out ahead of him.
“I found the boat!”
He could barely hear her over the rain and the waves.
Something gasped and gurgled and splashed much closer behind him.
Go
. Toward Annie’s voice and don’t stop until your hands grasp that ladder.
He swam. And this time he did it correctly, the way he was taught. No furious dog paddling, but the proper crawl stroke with the proper method of breathing.
“Here!” Annie cried. “Here!”
She just might save his life.
The surface of the sea exploded with light from the boat. Someone had flipped on the power switch and turned the darkness to daylight.
“Parker!” Annie screamed from the deck. He saw her face. Pure terror and shock and alarm at what she was seeing behind him. “Parker,
hurry
!” she shouted, hysterical now.
Somehow he swam faster. He didn’t think it was possible. He felt like a torpedo on the water’s surface, his feet behind him kicking in the water like a propeller. And he felt a strange sort of high and detachment. A deep and serious calm settled inside him. He moved fast, but time seemed to slow. He heard everything and noticed the tiniest details. Hundreds of individual raindrops striking the surface of the illuminated sea created hundreds of individual splashes and ripples. He heard every drop of water kicked up by his feet. He was going to make it. His body was damaged, but it was performing magnificently under the threat of imminent death.
The boat was less than twenty feet ahead of him now. He saw it clearly. The others were all on deck now, not just Annie. Kyle and Frank wielded crowbars. Hughes pointed his rifle directly at Parker.
And fired.
Parker saw the barrel flash and heard the
crack
of the shot at the same instant he felt a bullet pass so near his head that it might have taken off some of his hair. From not four feet behind him, he heard a smack and a gurgle.
“You’re clear!” Hughes shouted. “Get up here! Now!”
Parker reached for the ladder and felt a rip in his shoulder as he overextended. Frank stood there waiting. He reached out his hand. Parker grasped it with his good arm. Frank pulled him up and onto the deck. Parker rolled over and lay on his back, gasping.
He coughed water out of his mouth and his nose and heard another loud
crack
of Hughes’ rifle. He was safe. He didn’t die. None of them died. Everyone was okay.
But his relief shattered at once when he realized they had nowhere to go.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The storm blew over and brought back the night sky, including a quarter moon. All was not lost. Kyle could see just fine now, and he knew what to do. There was never any chance they could build a new world without setbacks, but everything would be fine. The others would see.
Adjacent to Orcas was another smaller island. He forgot its name, but no matter. Hardly anyone lived there. Just a handful of houses. There certainly wasn’t a town, nor was there ferry service. The few people who lived on the island had to come and go on their own.
So that was the place. Kyle would take his companions there to shelter for a few days until everyone regained their strength and their nerve.
He guided the boat into the passage between Orcas Island and the other one. No one—and no
thing
—was going to bother them there.
“We can sleep here,” he said and dropped anchor. “We’re a mile from land. Only the open ocean is safer.”
No one objected, not even Parker.
God, the islands were beautiful in the moonlight, like emerald mountains in a liquid pearl sea.
“We can head over to that small island in the morning,” he said.
“Not a fucking chance, Kyle,” Parker said.
Parker was angry. Kyle understood. He understood perfectly. And frankly, he couldn’t blame Parker. He almost died in the water off Eastsound. If Hughes hadn’t shot that thing that was swimming up from behind him, he probably would have died. Kyle would never forget the terror on Parker’s face at that moment.
“You can stay on the boat again if you want,” Kyle said. “We’ll all understand. But you should know that hardly anyone lives on that island. The entire population I think is less than two dozen. It has to be safer than Orcas.”
“You don’t know that,” Hughes said.
“He fucking well doesn’t,” Parker said.
“Guys,” Frank said.
“Okay,” Annie said. “Everybody stay calm.”
“I’m perfectly calm,” Parker said. “Why wouldn’t I be perfectly calm? Kyle’s island of horrors didn’t
actually
kill me.”
“We’ll sail around the island in the morning and check it out,” Hughes said. “See what we see.”
“Of course,” Kyle said. “But there’s probably nobody on it. The residents would have starved by now if they didn’t go somewhere else.”
“You hear that?” Parker said. “Kyle found us a safe place, but we’ll starve to death if we stay there.”
“All right,” Kyle said, “you know what—”
“We have a week’s worth of food on this boat,” Hughes said. “We won’t starve tomorrow.”
“What do we do when it runs out?” Frank said.
Kyle had a plan, but it was better to wait and fill the others in later. Nobody wanted to hear it right now, especially not Parker. But ultimately it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what Parker wanted. Kyle’s plan was solid. The others would see that.
But he did feel disappointed and chastened. Orcas Island hadn’t worked out, not yet. The place was a mess. A dangerous mess. But his new plan would work out just fine.
It had to.
* * *
If Eastsound was infected, what were the odds that the other islands were clear?
The odds were not good. No, they were not good at all. Friday Harbor was out. So how on earth could Annie find someone to fly her to South Carolina?
She couldn’t.
She’d have to drive there. Or walk. That wasn’t going to happen, not by herself. Frodo in
The Lord of the Rings
had better odds of taking the ring of power to Mordor. And he had a much better reason—
Wait.
Boom
. She got it. There might be a way.
If only …
But she could get herself killed, or even all of them killed. So many ways it could go wrong. It would be the biggest risk of her life, but if it worked, it could change everything.
First she’d have to tell them.
God, she’d have to tell them.
* * *
They went ashore in the morning. Hughes approved the idea after Kyle sailed around the island’s perimeter. It was but a fraction of the size of Orcas, just two miles long and one mile wide. Nothing stirred on the shore or in the trees. The mere handful of houses visible from the water looked abandoned.
This time they used a small private dock instead of swimming ashore. They had to. Each had only one set of dry clothes. The air temperature outside barely reached fifty degrees Fahrenheit. Six inches of rain must have fallen the previous night. Building a fire from soggy wood wasn’t possible. If they swam in the sea again and couldn’t dry off, hypothermia would kill them just as surely as a pack of those things.
The dock seemed to belong to the owners of an enormous house a few hundred feet up a grassy hill. A trim gravel path wound its way up to the expansive porch. One other boat—a motorboat, not a sailboat—was lashed to the dock. Somebody might still be on the island. They’d have to be careful.
Hughes stepped off first. He brought the rifle and had Frank take the shotgun. The dock sounded hollow under his boots. Kyle followed, then Frank, then Annie, then Parker.
Hughes saw no signs of trouble at or near the house, but it was hard to tell for sure from this distance. “Do we have binoculars in any of those backpacks?”
“I don’t think so,” Frank said.
“Should have got some binoculars.”
They started up the path. Gravel crunched under their boots. Nobody said anything. Parker limped and grimaced and grunted once in a while, but even he didn’t say anything.
The path wound its way a safe distance from a short stretch of cliff about sixty feet above the water before turning again and heading straight to the house.
Whoever built that house had serious money. It looked like a cross between a gigantic log cabin and a small mountain lodge. The roof was pitched to let snow slide off even though snow rarely fell at sea level in the Northwest. The walls were painted the color of wood, the window trim green like the forest. The front porch, held up by fat log pillars, was as big as a small apartment. It would be a nice place to rest up if it checked out.