The Serophim Breach (The Serophim Breach Series) (38 page)

“KHON, KHON, KHON,” he mumbled to himself. Seconds later, his eyes shot open, and he looked at Paul. “What channel is K-HON?” he blurted out.

His brother looked at him, confused, until he reminded him that K-HON was one of the news stations on the island. They rarely watched television, and almost never the news, but they quickly decided that it was either channel two or channel four.

“Mike took a police radio with him—a walkie-talkie—and he’s telling us what channel he’ll be on.” Kai felt sure he had found the answer.

“Why didn’t he just put the channel?” Paul asked.

Kai shrugged, too anxious to get on the radio to worry much about the answer. Instead, he directed Paul to search out the walkie-talkies, and his brother hauled himself up off the floor, moving carefully around the pile of bodies to search behind the front desk. Almost immediately, he popped up with a victorious smile.

“I found them!” he shouted in a whisper.

He hurried back to the cell and plopped down on the concrete near Kai, jostling Jones in the process. Jones let out a groan and opened his eyes, confused by the new seating arrangements. As Paul got the radio on and tuned to channel two, Kai quickly explained what they were doing. Jones gave him a tepid smile in response.

“K-HON is definitely channel two,” he said. “I hope everyone’s okay,” he mumbled before closing his eyes again.

The sound of static that burst through the speaker made them all jump.

“Now what?” Paul asked.

Kai reached through the bars for the radio and pulled it back to him. Pressing the call button, he spoke quietly.

“Mike? This is Kai.”

He released the button and listened as the static crackled at them. After a few moments, he hit the call button again.

“Mike, this is Kai. We’re at Pearl City.”

Again, he released the button, and the static buzzed loudly.

“Are you sure it isn’t channel four?” Paul asked. “Maybe we should try.”

Groggily, Jones spoke up again.

“It’s definitely two,” he said. “My grandma watches every night. Alan Ohana and Julie Ka’alina, the best team in news,” he continued in an affected voice.

“Maybe they’re out of range,” Paul suggested.

At that moment, the static broke, and a small voice came through the speaker.

“Kai?”

He clutched the radio as if it were his sister’s hand, pulling it close to his face.

“Sarah?” he said, unable to keep the anxiety out of his voice.

A brief second of static, and then her voice came through again.

“Kai! Are you okay? Mike let me answer ’cause he said you’d want to know I was okay,” she said, speaking quickly. Her voice was low, quiet, like it had been when she called him from her closet.

“He was right. Are you? Is everyone else okay? How’s Heather?”

Suddenly the general sense of fear that he might not find them or that something might happen to his sister or to the others solidified into a more concrete terror. What if Heather had been hurt? Or . . . He stopped himself and waited for the answer.

“We’re all okay. We’re in Mike’s car. We took a car from the station, but the windshield got broken, so we switched at his house—”

“How did the windshield get broken?” Kai cut in, concerned.

“—trying to get to Honolulu or something, but Mike says we can’t get into the city. So we’re trying to get back to the station and come meet you.”

Kai heard Mike say something in the background, and Sarah said, “Oh. Kai, Mike says this doesn’t work like a phone, and only one of us can talk at a time, so you go,” followed by static.

Kai smiled, his heart warming.

“Sorry, kiddo. I tried to ask you about the windshield, so I missed some of what you said. You guys tried to get to Honolulu? Go ahead.” And he released the call button.

A second later, her voice came again.

“Yeah. Mike left another note for you at his house, that we were going to the airport. He says whatever is going on is bad and getting worse. And we need to try to get off the island, so he was thinking the airport. But the freeway is jammed with cars—oh, here, Mike wants to talk to you.”

Static again.

“Kai?”

“Go ahead, Mike.”

“Look, this thing is big. And serious. I don’t know what you’ve seen, but . . . Lori was killed in our house. The neighborhood is burning down, and I haven’t seen a cop or a fire truck in hours. We’ve been attacked . . . more than once. There’s something wrong with people, and I think it’s spreading. Over.”

Briefly, Kai considered how to respond. He knew Sarah would be listening, but there was no way to soften the information.

“I know. We’re at the station now, and everyone’s been killed. We’re trying to get out now, and we’ll come meet you. Over.”

“They’re not even updating the emergency message, Kai. We’ve been checking every hour; it’s just the same message about getting to an evacuation center like the Pearl City station. We passed another police station, and we didn’t even stop. It was dark—didn’t look like an evacuation center to me. And everywhere we go, there are groups of looters or worse. Over.”

“Where are you now?”

“We’re on our way back to Pearl City. Almost passing Halawa.”

“Okay. Okay, let me think for a minute.”

Kai took his thumb off the call button and turned down the static. He looked at Paul, who was watching him with wide eyes.

“They can’t get into Honolulu?” he asked.

Kai shook his head. “Mike doesn’t want to scare the girls. I’m sure there’s more to that, but we’ll have to wait to talk to him. But I think he’s right. I think we have to get off the island somehow.”

“Without the airport?” Paul pressed.

Kai considered this for a moment. He had never spent much time thinking about the fact that they lived on an island; the planes that ran between the islands made it easy to feel connected, the sea that separated them nothing but a pretty view from a window seat. Now, he imagined the dark, churning water, cloudy after an angry storm, and felt very far away from help.

“What about a boat?” Jones had lifted his head and was watching them both with red, watery eyes.

Paul raised his eyebrows, considering the idea. Kai did the same, trying to imagine what they would have to use to get across the dangerous, choppy stretch of sea between them and Maui, the nearest island with an airport. He had no idea how far they would have to travel by sea, but the more he thought about it, the clearer the answer became—a boat was likely their only option.

“Mike, don’t come to the station. If we want to get off the island, we have to get to a harbor and try to take a boat. Over.”

Static.

“You have any suggestions?”

“I don’t. I haven’t been on a boat in years. Do you have a map of the island you can check?”

Static.

“Yeah. Let me pull off the road and look it over. Give me a few minutes. Over.”

Kai turned the radio down again and let out a long breath.

“Now we just have to get you out of there,” Paul said, his brows knitted in frustration.

“How about we shoot the lock?” Jones suggested.

Kai noticed he was blinking a lot, but he seemed more engaged in the conversation than he had been for some time. Not wanting to shut him down again, Kai shook his head gently.

“I think that only works in the movies. Besides, I don’t know if the shot could ricochet or cause shrapnel or something. The last thing we need is one of us with a gunshot wound.”

“Well, then, what do you suggest?” Jones responded, a twinge of frustration in his voice.

Kai was formulating an answer when the hairs on the back of his neck pricked up. He turned to look behind him, unsure of what was setting him on edge. And then he heard it: Mike had started speaking to him over the radio again, and with the volume turned down on the unit he had in his hand, he realized that he could hear an echo of Mike’s voice, coming from outside the building. Jones and Paul heard it at the same moment, both swinging their heads around in an attempt to locate the sound.

“Are they here?” Jones wondered loudly.

“Shh,” Kai hushed him and brought the radio in his hand to his ear.

“Kai, did you hear me?” Mike’s voice murmured in his ear and echoed from outside, followed by the same static. Kai pressed the call button again and said in a low voice, “Mike, go off air until you hear from me. Over.”

A brief moment of silence, and then Mike said, “Copy” in a terse voice. Kai turned his radio volume down completely and listened to the static of another radio. He thought the sound was moving, getting louder, but it was difficult to tell.

“What is that?” Jones whispered, cowering back in the shadows.

“Another radio,” Kai answered him. “Someone’s outside.”

They waited, holding their breath, listening to the static as it grew louder, closer. Kai could hear Jones beginning to mutter to himself in the corner, but it was impossible to make out what he was saying. Paul remained at the cell door, gripping the shotgun and still as a stone, his eyes trained on the blockade in front of the door.

The minutes passed, and the sound of the static at the door bore down on his fraying nerves. Finally, they heard a low grunt, and the sound of the door frame being rattled.

Jones scoffed.

“Oh yeah, try the door. Smart.”

The sound of rattling metal came again, along with small, menacing sounds of frustration. Again, the door rattled, harder this time, and one of the boxes at the top of the pile slid out of place, crashing to the ground with a loud thud, sending papers fluttering into the air. They heard an almost gleeful shout of success, and whoever was outside immediately began shoving at the objects in front of the door, shifting them away from the opening inch by inch.

“Oh shit, here we go,” Jones moaned, and he scurried across the hallway to pick up his weapon.

“Paul, get back,” Kai ordered firmly, but his brother shook his head.

“Just wait,” he answered, his eyes still trained on the door, the gun barrel aimed resolutely into the darkness.

Kai was halfway through his protest when suddenly the couch in front of the door moved significantly, and an insane, chattering laugh slid in through the open doorway. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to allow him to see a face peek in through the wide gap created, and the glint of eyes and teeth.

“Paul, move!” he shouted. His brother had positioned himself in front of the cell, preventing Kai from getting a good shot at the door. “
Move!
”

“Just wait, Kai!” Paul answered in a strong, flat voice.

The face at the door grew slowly into a body, slithering through the gap; first the shoulders wriggled through, and then the large torso, the man grunting and jabbering quietly as he worked his way into the building. Kai urged his brother to move again and again, with Jones chiming in occasionally, but Paul stood fast, ignoring them.

Finally, the man pulled his legs inside and clambered to his feet. It was difficult to make out his features, but Kai could see that he was missing several fingers as well as an ear. The rest of his face was dark and slick with blood. The crazed man’s eyes flitted from Paul to Kai and back, and his ruined mouth opened slightly, his jaw working from side to side as he swayed in front of them. A roar welled up in his throat and exploded into the air. Kai winced against the sound and shouted again for his brother to step aside.

It was in that moment that Paul fired his shotgun, the muzzle flash lighting the room and flecking Kai’s vision with dots of pink and gray. The figure of the man crumpled instantly, what had been his head mostly splattered against the back wall of the lobby.

They were silent for a long moment, and then Paul moved forward swiftly, working around the pile of bodies to the front door, where he first checked that the intruder was dead, and then slid the couch back into place.

“What the hell, Paul!” was all Kai could think to shout. Still, his brother did not answer; instead, he went back to the dead man’s body and began fishing through the pockets in his black cargo pants. Kai was too angry and filled with adrenaline to formulate a very coherent thought, so he watched, fuming, as his brother rifled through the man’s clothes, carefully, thoroughly, as if he was looking for something.

“What are you doing?” Jones finally asked.

Seconds later, Paul stood and held out his hand, its contents jangling quietly.

“That was Nordec,” he stated, his voice calm and empty. “And these are the keys.”

Kai’s mouth dropped open. He felt a strange surge of pride, quelled only slightly by concern over his brother’s calmness in the face of so gruesome a death.

“I wanted to let him get inside so I could look for the keys without worrying about someone else rushing up on the door,” Paul explained as he came back to the cell.

“How did you know it was Nordec?” Jones asked, clearly in awe.

Paul shrugged.

“I didn’t, I guess. But as soon as Kai said it was another radio, I figured it had to be one of those guys. Either they had their own and they were picking up the conversation, or they took one from the station. There was only one left on the base back there, and there are slots for four. Anyways, I figured if we let him get inside, maybe we could get the keys back.”

By this time, he had a key in the cell door lock. The bolt slid free with a loud metallic whine, and the door opened slightly, the bottom frame coming to rest against a body. Kai had not allowed himself to consider the scene around him while he had been locked inside the cell, but with the door now open, the full horror of the bodies and the gore swarmed him, and he rushed forward, stumbling out from behind the bars. Immediately, he wrapped Paul in a fierce hug.

“Next time, just tell me what you’re doing,” he growled.

He felt Paul’s cheeks rise as his brother grinned.

“You would have yelled at me the whole time anyways,” he answered with a chuckle.

Kai reached back through the bars for the radio and called Mike up again.

“Everything okay?” Mike’s voice was strained.

Kai told him everyone was all right and asked if he had made any progress on finding a harbor. Mike answered that he was still looking over the map and trying to figure their best options; he had tried to raise them earlier to tell them that he had seen an unmarked helicopter flying low over the island, headed from the windward side toward Honolulu.