by Rory Power
The shore drifts away. Reese never looks back.
CHAPTER 25
We stick close to the north side of the island. Reese is keeping the motor running low to save gas, and we move slowly, the coast slipping by, snow spiraling in gentle gusts. Trees lined up next to one another like matches, and then, as the sun nears high noon, the marshland begins. Just about half a mile before we reach the point of the island where the pier juts out.
The going is tougher here, with sandbars cropping up in strange places. I squint, scan the shore for the visitors’ center. Just past it, the ocean floor drops deep, and then it’s into open water.
Soon enough, there it is. The center is perched on the north side of the island, cut off from the marsh by a thick band of trees. Built to look like a house, coastal and shingled with a viewing porch, and a boxy addition off the back, from maybe a decade ago when the tourism board decided to try to go modern. But today it looks practically shapeless, draped over in some sort of tent.
I sit up straight. Rub at my eye, blink hard, and look again. There’s the radio antenna, poking through, but the rest of the building is tented, its edges catching in the breeze.
“Stop,” I say, and Reese flips a switch so the motor idles.
“What is that?” she asks. “That place should be empty.”
The tent doesn’t seem to cover the whole building, but I can’t tell from here. I’ve seen things like that for fumigation, for keeping buildings isolated. But why would it be here?
And it clicks into place. A boat left the dock that night at the Harker house, but it didn’t make for Camp Nash. It came here.
“We always thought they were on the mainland,” I say. “The Navy, the CDC. But they weren’t. They’ve been on Raxter this whole time.” I turn to Reese. “That’s who I heard Welch talking to on the walkie. They’re the outpost. Think about it. There’s no way they’d bring infected material to the mainland.”
“So they send a unit here instead.” Reese frowns. “It makes sense. But they’re risking their own contamination.”
“A trade-off.” Their own safety, for access to materials. Access to us. “And when they’re ready to test a cure, they ask for a live subject. And they get one.” I lean forward, send the boat rocking to one side. “That’s where Byatt is. I know it.”
* * *
—
Reese takes the boat around the point of the island and aims for the pier. The moorings are all long gone, and we don’t have any rope, so she heads for the shallows, noses it into the marsh.
She lets me get out first, says she’ll keep the boat balanced while I do. The water’s muddy here, and I can’t see the bottom, but it can’t be that far down. I get astride the gunwale, the boat tipping as I let more of my weight slide over the edge. And then there’s the water closing cold over my legs as I push off the boat and land in the reeds.
It only comes halfway up my calves, but it’s a wrenching cold, worse than any day we’ve had so far. I shiver violently, remind myself not to make a break for the shore and to hold the boat so Reese can get out.
She slings the backpack over her good shoulder and slips over the side easy, like she’s done it a thousand times, and of course she has. She sloshes around to the stern and pushes while I guide the boat from the bow. Together we get it beached, a foot or two above the waterline.
The ground between here and the visitors’ center is mostly marsh, with almost no cover before we hit the trees keeping the center out of sight. We stay off the boardwalk, stay low to the ground, creep through the gnats and the stink only just dusted with white. Safer that way, but I feel hot, my skin crawling, and sweat is fresh on my upper lip. Maybe the jets aren’t coming, and maybe they haven’t been evacuated, and maybe they’re still here.
Things keep shifting in the corner of my eye. I keep hearing the click of a safety releasing. A reed snaps behind me, and I flinch, drop to my knees. They’re coming. It’s over, it’s over.
“Hey.”
I just hope they do it quick, put the bullet between my eyes. I won’t fight it—I’ve earned it, I deserve it—but please, don’t make me wait.
“Hetty. Jesus, you’re burning up.”
I feel it, then, a hand on my forehead, and I blink hard. Reese, it’s Reese, and she maneuvers me to sit, my chin to my chest, the ground damp and seeping underneath me.
“We should take a break,” she says as she roots through the backpack for the first aid kit. “You need rest.”
“I’m fine.”
Reese throws the first aid kit down, a bottle of aspirin slipping out and into the mud. “It’s not enough,” she says, anger tearing at her voice. “What will any of this do?”
When she helps me up, we leave the first aid kit behind.
At last we’re across the marsh and in the trees, picking our way through them until we come out the other side and see the visitors’ center looming, plastic tent whipping in the wind.
The walkway is just ahead, the flagstone path sneaking out from beneath the tent. I know I should have some sort of plan, some special way to sneak in, but my hand hurts, and I’m so tired, and all I can think to do is lift the tent and duck under it. Reese swears behind me, and then she’s following. The plastic drops down behind her, sealing us into the stifling dark.
We pause for a moment, in case somebody comes running, but there’s only silence, and if the jets are on their way, the research team must have already evacuated. The center’s double doors are an arm’s length away. I reach out, pull lightly on the handle, and it opens with a squeak.
“Should we just go in?” I ask.
Reese shrugs, her shoulder brushing mine. “What, you want to knock?”
Inside, the main lobby looks the way it did on my first day at Raxter. Faded and yellowing, the walls painted with abstract shapes in shades of green and blue. We cross the room to the reception desk, which is long enough for three or four people. Only one chair behind it, and most of the surface covered by wilting catalogues about the area’s recreational points of interest.
“It’s so quiet,” Reese says. “And so warm. Do you think anybody’s here?”
I think of Headmistress, promised a way out and then left behind. “No. They must have evacuated.” I lean over the desk, pick through the catalogues, but there’s nothing important, nothing to help us find Byatt.
“Where would they put her?” I say, turning to Reese. “They’d need a big enough room.”
“There’s an event room at the back of the building, in the new bit.”
She leads me along the ground floor. We follow signs down a main hallway and then around a room labeled as a chapel to another lobby, this one smaller, shabbier.
There’s blood on the linoleum. That’s the first thing I notice. Pools of it, drawing a path in either direction away from the stairwell that leads up to the antenna tower. I exchange a look with Reese. It’s a lot. More than anybody could really stand to lose.
“Left or right?” Reese says.
We head left, follow the signs for the event room. A bank of windows opens up, and inside, the room is all gurneys and curtains and tears in the linoleum tile. Along the far wall, a small row of cabinets and a sink, a wet bar for the parties nobody ever had here, and above the cabinets, papered over but showing through, posters advertising all Raxter has to offer.
“Where do you think they went?” Reese asks. “The doctors, I mean.”
“Back to the base on the coast, maybe. This place is far enough from school that we wouldn’t see if somebody came to get them.”
The door’s open, the trail of blood disappearing through it, and I go first, take careful steps into the ward. Four beds, three slept in. Across from me one bed is rumpled, the covers thrown off, an IV stand knocked over next to it. Red stains are smeared across the floor.
Reese picks
up the clipboard tied to the foot of the gurney and scans it. “This is her. There, see? Byatt Winsor.”
She really was here. But I’m too late. I’m always too late.
I turn, scanning the rest of the room for some sort of clue, when I notice the bed to the left of the door. It’s drenched, the covers soaked with deep maroon splotches. In the middle of it all there’s a scalpel, glinting softly in the flickering light. And there’s something else too.
“Hey,” I say, and Reese turns. “Look.”
“What the hell is that?”
We inch closer. It’s not moving, but Raxter taught me not to trust my eyes. Things can be dangerous long after they’re dead.
“Is that—”
“A worm,” Reese says.
It’s caked in dried blood, but underneath I can see pale, translucent flesh. And somehow it looks familiar. I’ve never seen it before, I’m sure of that, but there’s a twitch in my gut; like answering like.
The worm, and the scalpel, and I can put it together now. Byatt here, with the scalpel in her hand, digging through her insides until she found what she was looking for.
“That was inside her,” I say. And then, because we’re both thinking it: “There’s one inside us, too, isn’t there? It’s the Tox.”
Parasites, living in our bodies, making us their own. Using those who can take it, abandoning those who can’t. Protecting themselves at all costs. Inside me, inside the animals—inside Raxter. Making us wild.
I can’t keep looking at it. I bend over, convulsing as I dry heave.
“It’s okay,” Reese says, rubbing my back.
“I want it out of me.” Tears spring to my eye, and I’m breathing too fast, I have to slow down, I have to. “Please, get it out.”
“We can’t do that.”
I straighten, push her arm off me. “Don’t you want it out of you?”
“We don’t know what might happen if we try. We could bleed to death.” Reese tucks my hair behind my ears, gives me a shaky smile. She’s trying so hard to make it okay. “We’ll figure it out,” she says. “We’ll figure it all out.”
“I don’t understand. How could we not know?”
“It must’ve grown. It would’ve been small to start with. Microscopic.”
“But”—and I feel lost, like the whole world’s learned a new language and left me out of it—“what about tests? Our blood tests, and physicals. And why now? Why us?”
“I don’t know,” Reese says. She goes back to the clipboard from Byatt’s bed and starts flipping through the papers collected there. I wish I could be like her; I wish I could let go of things when there’s nothing to be done.
I stand next to her, read over her shoulder and catch words here and there that I know—“estrogen,” “adapting,” and over and over again, “failure”—but most of it’s all charts and numbers. Are the answers in there somewhere?
More charts, more paragraphs done in unreadable handwriting, and Reese flicks through quickly, barely looking at them, until she stops on one page.
“What is it?”
She folds over the corner, then dumps our backpack out on the mattress, fishes through it for the records we took from the school.
“Reese?”
“I thought I recognized this,” she says, and lays out the pieces of paper. Twin graphs, with analysis printed below in text so small I’d need a magnifying glass to make it out.
“It tracks the climate,” Reese explains, pointing to one axis where years are listed. The year of the Tox is highlighted on one copy, yellow ink faded and bleeding. “The average temperature on Raxter over time. Look, it goes way back.”
One copy in the school records, and another here in a makeshift hospital, pinned to Byatt’s bed. And there it is—the climate changing, the temperature rising. I read once about creatures trapped in the arctic ice. Prehistoric, ancient things, coming awake as the ice melts. In Maine, on Raxter, a parasite slowly reaching into the weakest things—the irises, the crabs—until it was strong enough to reach into the wilderness. Into us.
CHAPTER 26
Reese keeps staring at the graphs, and I take the clipboard from the bed, peer at the rest of the documents. Observations made about a patient BW. And on the bottom of every form, the same signature. I can’t read it, but there’s a printed name underneath, under “Attending Doctor.”
“ ‘Audrey Paretta,’ ” I read. “That was Byatt’s doctor.”
Headmistress said they dosed her with the gas. It would’ve been Paretta who did it, who made the decision to kill my best friend. If she were here, I’d tear her eyes out with my bare hands.
“She got evacuated,” Reese says gently. “There’s nothing we can do about her right now.”
I nod, push the thought of Paretta out of my head, and keep flipping through the clipboard. Tests and tests, and none of them working. The Tox too strong to die, and us too weak to live. RAX009, they labeled her. Eight others, then, and I think of Mona in that body bag.
Welch said that night that they thought they’d gotten it right. They must have sent Mona back to school, waited to see if she would last, if the cure they’d found would hold. But she didn’t, and it didn’t, and I bet she’s somewhere in this building, eyes wide and staring, body stiff and sliced open for answers. This story was hers too.
I give Reese another minute to poke through the room, let her gather up the documents from Byatt’s bed and shove them back into the bag. When she finishes we both head for the door. There’s nothing more we need in here, and the jets will be overhead soon enough. It’s time to get Byatt.
We follow the blood back out of the ward, down the hallway and through the lobby. It leads past the stairwell and along a narrowing corridor that twists sharply. The trail gets fainter, but it doesn’t give out, and here and there, scattered along the wall, are handprints, as if somebody leaned on it to keep themselves upright.
After a third corner the air begins to smell of the outside, fresh and clean. I speed up, Reese at my shoulder. And then it’s there, a door, dented and half open. And beyond it, grass and daylight.
I slam through it, stumble out into a small pockmarked yard. A chain-link fence closing us in, and beyond it trees bristling thick with leaves. This must be around the back of the building, pressed up right against the woods. Above us the sky is vivid blue, uncluttered with clouds.
I almost don’t see her. A ways down, propped up against the wall of the center, body so small and crumpled, jacket wrapped tight around what’s left of her.
“Byatt?”
I’m running, feet pounding the earth, and I crash to my knees by her side. It’s a mess, it’s awful, but I can’t look away. Snow scattered across her dark hair. A bandage around her arm, soaked through with blood, her skin so pale I can almost see through it, and a Raxter Iris clutched in her pure black fingers. She’s cold. Her body’s so cold.
“Byatt. Byatt, hey, come on. It’s me, it’s Hetty.”
No answer. I feel for a pulse at her neck, but I’m shaking too hard, and she’s looking right at me, eyes bright and warm, just the way I remember them. Only there’s nothing behind them now. No life, no hidden place. I stroke her hair back, and it’s a year ago and a month ago and the first day we met all at once. Byatt sneaking me food from the kitchen, Byatt calling my parents for me when I failed a test, Byatt saving me a seat during evening mass, Byatt, Byatt, holding me through nightmares, always walking on my blind side and resting her hand on my elbow until I learned not to need it. My friend, my sister—part of who I am.
“The doctors dosed her with the gas,” Reese says, and I drag myself back to the world. “She must’ve known she was dying.”
Byatt, with the end almost on her. Taking her body back. Coming out here, away from where they put her.
A sob shatters me, and I press my face into the
curve of Byatt’s neck, give over to the shake of my body. Headmistress told me, but I couldn’t believe it. Byatt’s too big, too much to ever disappear. How could anybody do this to her? How could Paretta have met her and not seen what she’s worth?
“What do you want to do?” Reese asks when I’ve quieted. “I don’t think we can take her.”
“What?”
“We can’t stay here forever. The school’s probably destroyed by now, and the jets will be here soon.”
“I’m not leaving her,” I say, adjusting Byatt’s jacket.
“But—”
“I said I’m not leaving her.” And I don’t know how we’re getting around this, because I’m not giving in and neither is Reese. I can see it in the set of her jaw. Staying here is dangerous, I know that, but after everything I’ve done to find Byatt, I’m not leaving her now.
Reese sighs, and it looks like she’s about to say something when there’s a cough, a slight hitch in breathing, and I jump. Turn slowly, almost afraid to look.
She’s alive. Byatt, chest barely moving, eyes blinking as she opens her mouth.
“Oh my God.” I brace my hand behind her head to support her neck. “Byatt, can you hear me?”
Finally, she tilts her head, and she looks at me, and I can feel the smile slip from my face. Something’s off. “Byatt?”
“What is it?” Reese says.
“I’m not sure.” I take Byatt’s hand in mine, press it against my cheek. “It’s me. It’s Hetty.”
Nothing. No recognition. Byatt’s face, but nobody’s there.
“I don’t understand,” Reese says. “They gave her the gas. How is she still alive?”
I look down at her hand, limp and bony in mine. And the bandage on her arm, the edges of a gash peeking out from underneath.
“She’s alive because she took it out,” I say.
“What?”
“The gas was supposed to kill the Tox. But she took it out. So there was nothing for it to kill.” Byatt’s eyes unfocus, leaving her staring just over my shoulder. “And it’s like she came out with it. Her personality, her everything.”