Some Fine Day (17 page)

My heart hammers against my ribs as we pound down the mountain path. It’s as if all the pressures that have been building inside since I was taken – my dread of the hypercanes, my growing feelings for Will, the endless waiting for rescue, for
something to happen
– have all exploded with the storm now raging over our heads. The warning siren is quiet now but I can still hear it in my head, urging me on.

Get away. As far and as fast as you can. Before the monster shows its face.

The rain has churned the ground into a muddy river. We slip and slide as much as run and it’s a wonder neither of us break our necks. When we finally emerge from the jungle, half the tents are gone. Everyone’s moving purposefully, breaking down what’s left of the camp. Will snags the arm of a little black-haired girl whose half-naked body is streaked with dirt.

“Where’s the captain?” he snaps.

“Dunno, try the beach!” she pipes, yanking free.

“Damn,” Will mutters. “I hope we get more than a forty-eight hour lead this time.”

“What do I do again?” I ask a little breathlessly.

Charlie explained the procedure to me about a million times but of course my mind’s gone blank.

“Get your stuff. Use the backpack. I’ll meet you at the boats,” he says, and then he’s dashing off to the infirmary, where Lisa’s piling up plastic containers full of supplies.

A steady wind is just starting to rise. It flutters the leaves of the trees, and I try not to imagine what they will look like in a day’s time.

“Hurry!” Charlie calls to me from across the clearing. His face is white and pinched. If Charlie’s scared, that’s a pretty bad sign. “This one’s moving in real quick. I mean, quicker than I’ve ever seen.”

“Kelaeno,” I say without thinking.

“What?”

And then I realize the name means nothing to him. Kelaeno is the fastest and most destructive of the five storms, although that’s a bit like saying a hydrogen bomb is more destructive than an atom bomb. “Never mind. Will we make it?”

“If you get moving right now,” he yells, turning away to carry disassembled pieces of the LIDAR down to the waiting ships.

I stuff my few belongings into the pack. The blue dress I wore to the bonfire. One olive drab poncho. An ancient T-shirt Rupert gave me that says, in block letters barely legible anymore,
I Flunked Anger Management
. Four of Will’s books. Then I fold up the tarp tent and place it on top of the cot. It’s whisked away by two guys I know from class a minute later.

I take the path to the beach, and follow the high tide line towards the cove. The surface of the ocean is speckled with whitecaps and the sky is ominous, dark and low. Still, to an untrained eye, it looks like a regular thunderstorm. It’s hard to believe there’s a hypercane two thousand miles wide bearing down on us.

I time the interval between waves, counting slowly in my head. Six seconds.

That’s when I notice the first starfish. I’ve read about them but never seen one before. The five gracefully curving arms are white in the middle, with orange and pink spots running along the edges. A few yards later, there’s another, and then several more. I slow, letting the surf wash over my toes. Suddenly, the shore is full of them as far as I can see, thousands upon thousands stranded on the gravel and sand.

I’ve heard that big storms can do this, and the terrible waste of life saddens me.

At first, I think they’re all dead. But then I see one move. Just a tiny bit. I stare at it, transfixed. It moves again, and so do the ones around it. Which are so definitively dead they’re starting to shrivel like dried fruit.

I feel a faint vibration under my feet.

Oh shit.

Oh shit
.

I turn and start sprinting flat out as the first mole erupts in an explosion of dirt and gravel behind me.

The whirling drill on its nose makes a high-pitched shriek as the machine emerges fully and slams down, caterpillar tracks gripping the wet ground like it was asphalt. Seconds later, three more spew out of the waves, each a precise distance from the next.

I kick off the flip-flops in midstride and veer for the jungle, head down, blood pounding in my ears, as soldiers in full combat armor pour out of the open hatches. I hear the jagged bursts of machine guns, but don’t look back. The tree line is close, maybe a hundred yards. I can run that in ten seconds. But sometimes ten seconds is a long time.

A bullet grazes my arm, searing pain followed by numbness. That usually means nerve damage. I keep running.

All I can think is Will, I have to get to Will.

There’s shouting and screaming all up and down the shore now, punctuated by gunfire and the deep rumbling of the moles. I keep expecting another bullet to rip my head off, but then I’m in the trees, leaping over fallen logs and trying not to hit any sharp rocks with my bare feet. At some point I stop and rip a strip of cloth from my shirt for a tourniquet so I don’t bleed to death before I find him.

The sounds of fighting fade as I go deeper and turn parallel to the shore until I find the path. I slow to a jog. I’m so afraid of what I’ll find.

At the last turn before the clearing, the one where I waved to Will just a few minutes ago, I drop down and start crawling. My left arm is useless, and it takes me forever to reach the perimeter. I don’t see any soldiers, and I don’t see any moles. I don’t see anyone at all. They must have focused on the shore. They might not even know about this camp. Yet.

But it’s only a matter of time.

I decide to hell with subtlety and stand up. “Will!”

There’s no answer, and his tent is empty.

I hear the faint thrum of laser weapons being discharged not too far away. My left side is soaked with blood, and I can’t feel much below the shoulder. I know the whole island will be crawling with soldiers in less than an hour.

We’ll head for the hills. Maybe there’re deeper caves up there, someplace to hide. No one knows the island better than he does.

I start down the path into the woods, the one we always take in the mornings. I listen hard for any sounds out of the ordinary, and it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t heard a bird sing for days. They knew what was coming.

I’m about ten yards in when I hear a soft rustling in the undergrowth, almost masked by the dripping rain. It’s too low to be human. An animal, then? But I’ve never seen an animal here. Not even once.

“Will?” I call softly.

Silence. It has a primordial look, this place, with heavy moss-covered vines draping the tangles of downed trees and a layer of thin mist swirling around my feet. I hear the sound again, off to the left. It has a
slithering
quality that lifts the hair on the backs of my arms.

I start to run then, and something erupts out of the dead leaves. It’s shiny, about three feet long, and it moves like a snake. I stumble and it hits my leg, coiling five or six times around my ankle. There’s a metallic click as the thing’s head locks to its tail. A mobot. Autonomous kinematic machines with variable morphology. Which means they can reassemble themselves into any shape they want to. Like a manacle.

I feel a pinch as it draws blood. There’s a whirring sound.

“Jan!” It’s Will. He’s running down the path, his pack bouncing on his back.

A light on the mobot clicks from red to green. It’s confirmed my DNA. Time slows to a crawl.

“No!” I scream. “Go back! Run!”

But he keeps coming, as the mobot lets out a piercing wail that seems to go on and on and on.

Will lands next to me on his knees and starts yanking at the thing, but it’s useless. There’s no catch, no lever. My foot would have to come off to get free of it.

“Stop it,” I yell, pushing at him. I think I’m crying, but the only thing in my mind is the panic and the knowledge that I’ve brought this down on him. “Get away from me. Run, dammit!”

“No,” he says, and I love and hate him both in that moment.

He pulls me to my feet and then someone shouts, “Over here!”

A dozen soldiers in jungle camo and balaclavas materialize on all sides, gun sights trained at our heads.  

“Back away from her!” one of them barks at Will.

He raises his hands and takes two steps to the side.

“Don’t you touch him!” I scream. “He saved my life!”

“Kick the pack away!” the soldier orders. “Now get on the ground.”

Will complies, and then three of them rush over. One plants a boot squarely on his back.

“Shut that damn thing off,” someone says.

One of the soldiers peels back her balaclava. It’s a young woman with rosy cheeks and tough brown eyes. She kneels by my leg. I think about kicking her in the face and taking her gun, but I know they’d just end up killing both of us. She does something to the mobot and the shrieking siren quiets.

“I want him on the mole with me,” I say.

They ignore me. The woman gets on her radio mic. “Target acquired,” she says. “We’re bringing her in. Got another one too. A hostile.” She cocks her head, listening. “Roger that.”

“Hey!” I say. “Did you hear me? He saved my life. And you can’t leave him here, there’s a cane coming.”

“Whatever,” she says. She nods at the two soldiers behind me. “Sedate her.”

They grab my arms and I feel the sting of a needle in my thigh.

“Will,” I croak, but I can’t move, can’t do a thing.

“We need a stretcher!” she calls.

They slide a spinal board underneath me and then I’m being lifted up into the air, raindrops falling into my open eyes and mouth. “It’s OK, Nordqvist, we got you,” she says.

As they carry me off, I catch a last glimpse of Will, still on the ground, a soldier standing over him with his weapon pointed down. I hear it fire, and this time I manage to scream.

Deprived of the cosmos, our gaze turned inward. How much deeper could we go?

The drugs I’m on keep the full weight of my depression at bay for a while. But it’s always there, lurking in the dark like a chained-up dog. I’m terrified of what will happen when I finally look it in the eye. So I stay medicated.

I don’t remember the trip back. The first coherent images are of my mother’s hands, stroking my forehead. Her quiet sobbing when I first opened my eyes in the hospital. They treated me for six broken ribs and a shattered humerus, the upper bone in my arm. Plus too many minor lacerations to count.

Will’s death replays over and over in my mind. Awake and sleeping both. I’m starting to see details that I’m not even sure are real. His head turning toward me at the last second. His lips moving as if he was trying to tell me something. It always ends with that terrible sound, like a door slamming shut.

I keep thinking there had to be something I could have done differently. But I don’t know what. In my heart, I know they would have found me no matter how far we ran.

My parents believe I’m traumatized and that’s why I’m not talking and barely eating. I guess I am, but not for the reasons they think.

Since I’ve been able to get out of bed, my routine is to have black coffee for breakfast and then go walking in the gardens. My father took a week off when I first came home, but now he’s back to his usual workload so I don’t have to see him much. It’s been easy to blame him for everything, even though he did it out of love. Easier than blaming myself, though there’s plenty of guilt to go around. I still haven’t forgiven him. I might never. But I get it. I would kill in a heartbeat if I thought I could bring Will and the others back. I genuinely wish they had just left me on that atoll. One life against dozens.

My mom’s back at work part-time too, so I’m usually alone during the day, which is fine by me. Wandering in her extensive gardens, breathing the humid, richly scented air, lets me pretend I’m not thousands of feet underground. In my imagination, Will walks next to me, pointing out the different plants and flowers. We relive old conversations and I tell him things I’ve never told anyone, like how I desperately wanted to be a test pilot after reading about crazy Chuck Yeager, the first human being to break the sound barrier. I just couldn’t accept that the era of flight was over.

Sometimes Will laughs, and sometimes he lectures, and sometimes he just listens.

Sometimes we finish that kiss.

Those times are the worst. I go back to bed and stay there until they make it night again.

I can’t stop noticing all the miraculous little things I used to take for granted. Such as hot and cold running water. A refrigerator packed with food that I can take whenever I feel hungry. Soft sheets. A closet full of dresses and an entire drawer devoted only to underwear. Painkillers. Electric lights. Tampax. The list is endless.

The quantity of
stuff
we have down here boggles the mind, if you actually think about it. Yet none of it manages to fill the swelling void right in my center, like a balloon on the verge of popping. Everything – our house, our neighborhood, the immaculate faux-lawns and sleek cars – has a veneer of falsity, like I’m living on a giant movie set. Life has become a simulacrum of itself. We’re all just going through the motions, pretending everything’s fine when it’s about as far from fine as you can get.