“Twenty bucks says he was spanking it,” Ethan suggested.
Mara gasped. “That’s so gross.”
“Love isn’t gross, baby.” He flashed a smile. “It’s all natural.”
Dee backed out of the bathroom and closed the door behind her, the same way they’d found it. “Not like you can ask him.”
“True.” Ethan clicked his tongue as he followed Dee and Mara downstairs. “And it’s not like I have twenty bucks anyway.”
Nyles and Griselda were waiting outside. “Same?” Nyles asked.
Dee nodded. “You?”
“One dead body,” Griselda said. “Everything’s normal.”
“That makes twenty-two in all,” Mara said.
Twenty-two lives lost in the blink of an eye. Dee could hardly believe it. She’d seen plenty of death in the last few weeks, but this much all at once?
“I don’t understand,” she said, sitting down on the curb, forehead in her hands. “Why are they all dead?”
Mara sat beside her. “And why wasn’t any of it on camera?”
Dee’s head popped up. “That’s right. The cameras inside the Barracks—they were all dark. And The Postman feed is still showing the Death Row Breakfast Club.”
Nyles cleared his throat. “Can we stop calling us that?”
“Don’t worry, Nerdigan,” Griselda said with a sly half smile. “You’re still gonna be Anthony Michael Hall, whether they use the hashtag or not.”
He scowled. “I hate you.”
“Seriously, guys,” Dee said. “If the whole point of this island is to film our deaths for maximum public amusement, then why the hell would The Postman kill off three-fourths—”
“More like four-fifths,” Nyles corrected her.
He always had to be so precise. No wonder he was premed. “Why would The Postman kill off most of the people on the island and not capitalize on it?” She looked around, scanning the bright blue sky for signs of the drones. “Even now, you’d think he’d have those things right on top of us as we found all the bodies.”
“Affirmative,” Ethan said, lapsing back into his action-hero, faux-militaristic persona. “Skies are negative for bogeys, alpha delta.”
Griselda shook her head. “I literally don’t even understand what you’re saying.”
“Maybe he’s got a new crop of prisoners arriving,” Mara suggested, “and he needs to make room?”
“Rodrigo did mention a rumor about new inmates,” Nyles mused. “But I can’t imagine we’d get a shipment large enough to fill the entire Barracks. There were one hundred and fourteen of us when I arrived, and the island can hold almost double that amount.”
Shipment. Like they were a commodity.
“Even if that’s true,” Dee said, “why pass up the opportunity to film it?”
“Duh. Because there was something better to film,” Griselda said. “Us.”
“Like he can’t film more than one thing at a time?” Dee was frustrated. None of it made sense. “Besides, he orchestrated this. You and Nyles, the Hardy Girls, taunting me to come rescue you. It was all a distraction while he killed off everyone else on the island.”
“These poor bastards certainly didn’t see it coming,” Nyles mused.
“Maybe they all got raptured?” Ethan suggested.
No one responded.
“Poison?” Mara suggested after a pause.
“They didn’t look like they were in pain when they died,” Griselda said. “I’m pretty sure poison is painful.”
Dee had to admit she was right. “Sleeping pills, maybe?”
“No,” Nyles said. He was staring at the last house, rubbing his chin in thought. “It would be nearly impossible to get everyone to imbibe them voluntarily, and if water or drinks had been spiked, the atrocious taste would be a dead giveaway.” He paused, cringing at his own use of the word “dead.”
Ethan gripped his throat with both hands. “Do you think it was in the food?”
Griselda shook her head. “We’d be dead already, moron.”
“The purplish hue of the skin denotes a cyanotic reaction,” Nyles mused. “And the petechiae across the face suggest asphyxiation. My guess is that they were gassed. The houses must be wired for it.” He pointed to a vent on the outside of the nearest house. “The Postman could have installed a valve to cut off the fresh air and replace it with a quick and lethal asphyxiant. It probably happened very quickly.”
Dee’s booby-trapped living room seemed like even more of a joke. No spork was going to save her from a gas attack.
“So the only reason we’re alive is because we went to save your asses?” Ethan asked. “Selflessness for the win.”
But Nyles shook his head. “No, these people have been dead for at least twelve hours.”
“What?” Dee cried.
“Oh yes,” Nyles said. “We were all in our own apartments when the rest of the inmates were exterminated. Which means we have another problem altogether.”
As much as Dee didn’t want to admit it, Nyles was right. “The Postman wants us alive.”
“I’M NOT SURE THE Chinese-water-torture sitch counts as ‘wanting us alive,’” Griselda said.
“He didn’t gas us for a reason,” Nyles said. “Whether or not that reason is to kill us later is entirely up to him.”
“I am so fucking confused,” Ethan said.
“Shocking,” Griselda muttered.
Nyles crossed his arms over his chest, one hand cradling his chin. “I don’t understand why none of this was on camera. I’ve never seen a death on Alcatraz two-point-oh go unpublicized. Or unmonetized.”
Dee was right there with him. “And did you notice the crow cameras as we headed back to the Barracks? They didn’t even move.”
Mara turned, searching for the nearest camera mounted on a streetlamp. “You’re right. It’s not facing us.”
“And I haven’t seen any drones flying around today either,” Dee said. “It’s as if The Postman doesn’t want anyone to know what’s happening.”
“We need to talk to someone!” Mara cried, her breaths coming in short gasps. “Everyone needs to know what he’s done.”
Griselda snorted. “Right, we’ll just dial up our local prison liaison and let them know that we’re dissatisfied with our Alcatraz two-point-oh experience.”
“Talk to someone,” Dee repeated. “That’s it!” She grabbed Ethan’s wrist, twisting it so she could see the face of his watch. “Ten minutes to twelve.” They still had time to make Nyles’s appointment with his attorneys.
“My God!” Nyles exclaimed. “I’d totally forgotten.”
Usually when Nyles seemed to be inside Dee’s head, it was unsettling, but suddenly she didn’t mind so much. “Can we make it?”
“Make what?” Ethan said. “Lunch? I’m hungry.”
“Absolutely,” Nyles said, grabbing Dee’s hand. She felt a shock of electricity race up her arm. “This way!”
Dee and Nyles speed-walked through the Barracks without actually breaking into a run, Griselda, Ethan, and Mara following close behind. Everyone seemed to feel the urgency of the situation. Nyles’s lawyers represented their only connection to the outside world. Maybe their only chance at survival.
Nyles had held Dee’s hand for a few steps before he let go, and even though it should have been the last thing on her mind, Dee found herself obsessing over it. Had he merely taken her hand in excitement, a thoughtless gesture in the heat of the moment? Had he just wanted to get everyone up to the guard station as quickly as possible, and Dee was the closest person to grab?
And why the hell are you even worrying about this right now?
Dee shook herself, forcing her brain to focus on the life-and-death battle being waged on the island. Twenty-two lives had been snuffed out in the blink of an eye. The Postman had violated his own rules, and if Nyles’s lawyers could tell the world, Dee and her friends might have a chance.
They skirted the water, past the spot where Jeremy had met
his bloody end just a few nights ago, and headed toward the southern end of Alcatraz 2.0. The road ascended sharply as the island narrowed into an isthmus. Looming above them, hewn into the rocks, was the Alcatraz 2.0 guard station.
While the rest of Alcatraz 2.0 had been intentionally left to feel like a fake suburban town from twenty years ago, the guard station was 100 percent modern, 100 percent industrial, 100 percent intimidating. The concrete structure was elevated by the island, surrounded by a twenty-foot steel wall topped with an aggressive amount of barbed wire. Balustrades and turrets faced both the water and the land, jutting out at sharp angles so that every inch of Alcatraz 2.0 was in view. A helipad had been built on stilts to one side of the main building, and on the other, a short pier thrust twenty feet into the water. Two speedboats were moored there, and Dee realized that this was the entry and exit for all the Painiacs. How many of them were still on the island? Maybe secured inside the guard station at that very moment? The idea made her shudder.
Dee half expected the searchlights to be fired up the instant they started the ascent toward the main gate, and for dozens of guards to appear on the catwalk, automatic weapons loaded and ready. But instead they were met with an eerie stillness.
Nyles slowed his pace as they approached the main gate. A human-size door had been cut into the massive steel wall, and it stood open, exposing a sliver of the courtyard inside the compound. A small hut, surrounded by two-ton traffic barriers, stood sentry out front, and beside it, an enormous American flag hung limply from its pole.
“That’s odd,” Nyles said. “The door’s never open.”
“Then how do you get in?” Ethan asked.
“The sentry calls up to the control center. Then someone comes and opens the door from the inside.”
“So if the inmates decide to revolt,” Mara said, instantly grasping the rationale, “they can’t get inside. Even if they overpower the sentry.”
Nyles approached the sentry’s hut, craning his head to see inside the narrow window. “Hello? It’s Nyles Harding. I’m here to meet with my solicitors.”
A breeze gusted past them, rippling the Stars and Stripes, but other than that, there was no movement.
Nyles glanced down at Dee. “This isn’t normal.”
“Has anything about today been normal?”
“Good point.” Then he grabbed her hand, more gently than before, and together they entered the hut.
It was abandoned. A clipboard was perched on the high-backed stool, as if it had been left there by the guard when he was called away from his post. A red phone receiver sat in its cradle, the only means of communication inside the station, but the rest of the hut was empty.
It must have been an incredibly boring job, sitting there by yourself with nothing but the view of the San Francisco skyline and the flat grid of Alcatraz 2.0 to look at. Boring yet dangerous. It seemed pretty clear that the sentry was meant to be a sacrificial lamb if the inmates of Alcatraz 2.0 ever decided to rise up against their captors.
Maybe that was why the hut was abandoned? With only five prisoners left alive on the island, maybe the guards weren’t worried so much about their safety anymore?
Keeping Dee’s hand firmly in his own, Nyles picked up the security phone. Dee didn’t hear a dial tone or a voice on the other end.
“Hello?” Nyles said, tentatively. “Is anyone there?” He waited a few seconds before repeating himself, then finally replaced the receiver back into its cradle. “Nothing.”
“Fuck this,” Ethan said. “I’m going in.”
“Wait!” Nyles cried. But it was too late. Ethan sprinted through the open door into the courtyard like a commando on a suicide mission.
Without a second thought, Dee followed, dragging Nyles with her. Ethan had been there when she’d needed to rescue Nyles and Griselda, and she wasn’t going to let him face the guard station alone. She ducked through the narrow doorway to where Ethan stood frozen.
“Dude,” he breathed. But he wasn’t talking to Dee. His eyes were fixed on something across the courtyard.
Dee stepped out from behind Ethan’s mass and saw exactly what had stopped him in his tracks. A dozen bodies, all in the gray-and-black uniforms of the Alcatraz 2.0 prison guards, were sprawled across the ground. Some were clasping their throats, others appeared to be in the act of crawling across the asphalt, and all had the familiar purplish hue to their skin.
All of them were dead.
Ethan sat on the black asphalt, legs tucked up in front of him, as he leaned back against the wall of the guard station. “I’m starving.”
Griselda titled her head to the side. “We’re trapped an on island full of bloating corpses, and you’re worried about lunch?”
“I only had bananas and ice cream for breakfast,” he complained. “No protein. And besides, we should all be worried about where our next meal is coming from.”
“We should all be worried,” Nyles said, “about how we’re going to get out of here.”
Nyles was right. If the scene at the Barracks had been unnerving, what they’d found inside the guard station was positively horrifying. The dozen dead guards in the courtyard had represented the tip of the iceberg. It appeared as if they had all fled the building through the same exit: one guard had collapsed mid-escape, his corpse propping the door open. After Nyles had established that the guards had died at approximately the same time as the rest of Alcatraz 2.0’s inmates, and that the lethal gas had most likely dissipated as it had in the Barracks, Dee led them inside to search for survivors.
Ethan was game to explore the interior, of course. Nyles and Mara weren’t so sure, but it was Griselda, weirdly enough, who had tipped the vote in Dee’s favor. Her argument was persuasive.
“Find me a computer,” Griselda had said, “and in five minutes I’ll make sure the whole world knows what’s going on in here.”
Unfortunately, neither she nor Dee had found what they were looking for. No computers, and no survivors.
After stepping over the dead guard, they’d entered a large meeting room. It looked as if the entire garrison had been gathered together last-minute. A few folding chairs had been set up, haphazardly clustered around the room, but most of the guards must have been standing, facing the enormous screen mounted at the far end of the room.
All of this was speculation, of course, because there was no one left standing in the meeting room. The guards lay where they’d fallen, bodies on top of bodies, probably unaware of what was happening until it was too late.
Except for the bodies in the courtyard. Judging by the distribution of victims, that dozen must have been at the back of the meeting room by the door, perhaps farthest from the vents that delivered the fatal asphyxiant, and so they’d had a few extra seconds to react. Not enough, however. Even the ones who’d made it out into the fresh air had done so too late.
Nyles estimated sixty bodies between the meeting room and the courtyard. He and Ethan had tried opening the two interior doors that led out of the room, but both had security locks and wouldn’t budge. They’d searched a few nearby bodies for anything that could help—keys, cell phones, weapons. But each guard had the same single possession on him: an ID badge. Nothing else.
And so the Death Row Breakfast Club had gone back outside to figure out what the hell to do next.
“I wish there was a helicopter on that pad.” Ethan gazed at the empty helipad. “I’d fly us out of here so fast. Get to the chopper!” he cried in his Schwarzenegger voice, then sighed dreamily.
“You know how to fly a helicopter?” Nyles asked.
“Nope,” Ethan replied. “But it would be so awesome to try.”
Griselda shook her head. “Yes, because dying in a fireball is so awesome.”
“Maybe one of the boats?” Mara suggested.
Nyles ran a hand through is hair. “Only if we can find the keys. Unless the Terminator here knows how to hot-wire a speedboat?”
Ethan gave him a thumbs-down. “No can do.”
<
br /> “We can probably break into the bodega,” Dee said. “For food.”
Mara’s eyes grew wide. “But that’s against the rules.”
“Who’s going to enforce them?” Griselda said. “Look around—everyone’s dead.”
“There’s hardly anything left in the bodega,” Ethan said, dismissing the idea. “Maybe enough for a day.”
Mara paused for a moment, staring at the building behind them. “The guard station must have a kitchen.”
Ethan jumped to his feet. “Dude, yes! Nyles, my man, do you know where the mess hall is?”
Nyles sighed. “I’ve only been in a holding cell. They didn’t exactly set a place for me at supper.”
“Bummer.” He glanced around the courtyard, surveying the scene of dead guards. Then he marched up to the nearest body and patted him down.
“What are you doing?” Dee asked, less grossed out than confused.
By way of an answer, Ethan held up the guard’s ID badge. “Just finding us a way inside.”
“WHAT IF THERE’S SOMEONE still alive in here?” Mara asked as they crept down the first hallway.
Griselda shrugged. “They’ll probably shoot us.” But her cavalier delivery was in direct contrast to the fact that she walked so closely behind Ethan she was practically riding piggyback.
“None of the guards in the meeting room had weapons,” Dee said, trying to sound soothing. “And if there is anyone left alive, they’re on our side now.”
Mara wasn’t convinced. “This is a bad idea.”
As they pressed deeper into the facility, Dee wasn’t sure Mara was wrong. The guard station was unnerving. Gray tile floors, matching walls, rows of overhead fluorescents evenly spaced between security doors. And everything smelled crisply sterile, generically institutional. They could have been in a hospital or a government office building or a prison.
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