Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  “No. No, it is not,” Ethan said. “What did the nurse type?”

  “A string of nonsense, and then the word ‘Standby.’”

  “Standby.” Ethan glanced at Izzy, who hadn’t moved even though the rain had now plastered her long hair over her face. It was creepy. Sarah reached out and tucked Izzy’s hair behind her ears.

  “I think the nonsense was a password. And ‘Standby’ was a command,” Sarah said. “I know how that sounds…”

  “But he did this and she collapsed right away?”

  “Right away.”

  “So he was controlling her actions with the computer?”

  “Ethan, I’m not crazy.” Sarah shrugged. “Why else would she just shut off like that, right at that second? The nurse didn’t even try to get a sedative, he just ran for the computer.”

  “Yeah, that is weird,” Ethan agreed. “And if it was a coincidence that she shut off the instant he typed into the computer, he would have been surprised. Did he seem surprised?”

  Sarah shook her head.

  “Okay. So let’s assume that the doctors are somehow controlling Izzy,” Ethan said. “Is it the school, or is it that Fortitude Corporation Dr. Diaz talked about?”

  “Fortitude. The doctor was from Fortitude,” Sarah said.

  “So they turned her off because she was freaking out. And they turned her off right now because…” His eyes met Sarah’s. “Because she’s running away.”

  Ethan jumped to his feet and grabbed Sarah’s arm, pulling her up too.

  “They know what she’s doing,” Sarah said. “Does that mean—”

  “It means they can see where she is,” Ethan cut her off. “If they know she’s running, they’re tracking her. They’re coming after us, and we’re sitting ducks.”

  “We can’t leave Izzy here. She saved me. She wants to escape with us,” Sarah protested.

  “We have no choice! She won’t wake up.” He bent over, slapping Izzy lightly across the face. She didn’t move. “Even if she did, she’s got a tracker on her somewhere. I doubt she even knows about it. If she came with us, they’d find us.”

  “But—”

  Her words cut off when she saw a beam of light bounce across the wasteland. A flashlight, dim through the rain, shone in the distance near the hedge. Sarah’s heart began to pound.

  “These are people who are using a student as some kind of remote-control robot. Do you want to get caught by them?” Ethan asked urgently.

  “No.” Sarah took his hand. “Let’s go.”

  Ethan took off running, and Sarah did her best to keep up in the oversized shoes. She didn’t look back. Izzy remained, the cold rain pouring down on her.

  “I can’t go fast enough,” Sarah panted. “How do we get down to the dinghy, anyway? The asylum is on a bluff.”

  “There’s a way down through the basement of the asylum,” Ethan replied. He glanced over his shoulder at the flashlights. “We won’t have enough time to get there.” He swerved to the right, running toward something dark in the distance.

  “Where are we going?” Sarah asked.

  “There’s an old hunting blind in the woods. I think that’s what it is, anyway,” Ethan replied. “It’s hard to see, because it’s under the trees. If we hide, hopefully they’ll think Izzy was alone.”

  They ran silently until Sarah thought she might pass out, the wind and rain slapping at her face, her giant shoes bogging her down in the mud.

  “Here. It’s right inside the tree line.” Ethan slowed as they reached the edge of the woods that covered half the island. Sarah had never been to this part of the forest before, but it was as thick and tangled as the area around the Pine Tree clearing. The rain felt less oppressive here, and for the first time all night, Sarah was able to wipe the water from her face and stay dry under the thick canopy of branches.

  “How did you find this place?” she whispered.

  “Same way I found every place,” he replied. “There! It’s between these two trees.” He led her to a tiny shack entirely overgrown with ivy. Sarah could barely even see it in the dark, but Ethan led her to one end, pushed aside a bush, and crawled inside. Sarah followed.

  For a few minutes they sat in silence, completely soaked through, listening to the thunder as it grew louder. Sarah’s teeth chattered as she hugged herself, trying to get warm now that they were out of the wind.

  “Come here.” Ethan pulled her into his arms and held her against him.

  “What do we do now?” Sarah asked.

  “We still have to try for the dinghy,” Ethan said. “In the asylum’s basement there is a stairway down to the beach where the dinghy is. Maybe when they find Izzy, they’ll just take her back to the school. If we wait for half an hour, we can try again.”

  “No,” Sarah said. “We can’t leave. We have to find out what the hell this is, Ethan. Do we seriously think that some school contractor is controlling Izzy’s mind? That’s what we said. And we’re just going to leave?”

  “We can send help once we get away from here,” he said. “Telling the authorities is our best chance.”

  “Telling the authorities that our friend’s brain is being controlled?” she asked sarcastically. “Really, Mr. I Don’t Trust Authority?”

  Ethan shoved his wet hair off his face with his free hand. “I guess it would be pretty hard to convince them we weren’t making it up.”

  “It would be hard to convince them we weren’t mentally ill,” Sarah replied. “The school won’t take our side on this—they cover up things they don’t like.”

  “And they’re the ones who gave Fortitude permission to test their so-called experimental treatment on the students. They’d be liable too.” Ethan sighed. “I still don’t see what good it does us to stay here. We can’t fight them.”

  “But maybe we can find proof,” Sarah said.

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. But we have to try. If we ever want to find out what really happened to Izzy, to everyone, including your brother—”

  “We have to try,” Ethan said.

  “That way! You’re fifty feet off course,” a man’s voice shouted from nearby.

  “I cant see a fucking thing in this rain,” a second man called back. “You carry her for a few.”

  Sarah could hear her pulse in her ears and feel it with her whole body. She hadn’t heard anybody approaching, but these men had to be within a few yards of the hunting blind. Ethan put his finger to her lips, then he took her hand and pulled her over to a slit in the blind. They both peered out at the flashlights bouncing through the dark.

  “I’m not carrying her. I’m the only one who knows the way, dipshit,” the first guy said. “Just follow me.”

  Two huge men were attached to the flashlights. One of them had Izzy flung over his shoulder like a sack of grain. They were so close Sarah could smell the scent of cigarettes wafting off them.

  “It’s this way. You don’t go into the woods,” the first one was saying.

  “I like it better under here, less rain,” the other guy grumbled, but he followed his partner, roughly throwing Izzy from one shoulder to the other to get a better grip.

  “Where are they going?” Sarah whispered into Ethan’s ear.

  “Wherever it is, we’re following them,” he replied.

  18

  They were heading straight for the old asylum, which meant walking right across the open grassland. There were no trees to give them cover, and if one of the security guys happened to turn around, he’d catch Sarah and Ethan for sure. Sarah kept her eyes on the flashlight beams, ready to hit the dirt if one of those beams suddenly turned.

  “We can’t follow them down that rickety old staircase,” Sarah whispered, pulling Ethan close enough so she could talk in his ear. “They’ll see us.”

  “There’s no reason they’d be taking her to the asylum. I don’t get it,” he whispered back. “Maybe they’re just searching for the path back?”

  At that moment, the
two guys stopped. Ethan and Sarah exchanged a panicked look, and as one they dropped to the ground.

  There was a clanging sound, and something creaked in the darkness. The flashlights started away again, so Sarah moved to follow them, but Ethan grabbed her arm. “Wait,” he murmured.

  “What was that sound?” she asked.

  “The fenced-off building is over there. The ruin,” Ethan said.

  “You said that was the old doctors’ quarters or something,” she remembered.

  “Right, but since it’s up here on the bluffs, it’s been completely destroyed over the years. Why would they take her in there?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s go look.”

  They got up and moved as quietly as possible toward the flashlight beams, which were getting farther and farther away. After a minute, the lights disappeared entirely. Sarah saw a ten-foot-high chain-link fence loom up from the darkness.

  “They locked the gate behind them.” Ethan shaded his eyes, peering up into the rain. “It’s too high to climb, and the top arches over this way to keep people out.”

  “You sure it’s just an old ruin?” she asked.

  “Not anymore, I’m not,” he said. “I can’t believe I fell for that all this time. It’s the only part of the island I haven’t checked out. The place looks ready to disintegrate any second.”

  “I don’t get it. They’re dragging Izzy into a crumbling building?”

  “I have an idea. Come on.” Ethan took her hand and headed along the bluffs toward the asylum. “We can’t get over the fence, but maybe we can get under it.”

  “Through the asylum?”

  “Yeah. Remember the basement I told you about? There’s a hallway—a sort of tunnel—off of it. I went down that way once, but it was collapsing, so I stopped. I figured it went under the ruined building.”

  “So we’re going through a collapsed tunnel?” Sarah asked. “Great.”

  The staircase down to the asylum was terrifying in the storm. The rainwater made the wooden steps slick, and the wind threatened to blow the entire structure off of the wall. This time Sarah couldn’t wait to get to the bottom and jump off the final missing steps—anything to get off the stairs.

  “It’ll be dark in there,” Ethan said as they approached the grand old building. “My watch lights up, but that’s not enough. Once we get down to the basement, I don’t know how we’re going to see anything.”

  “There’s lightning,” Sarah said, gesturing out to the sea as a fork of light shot down.

  Ethan chuckled. “Yeah, that’ll work well.” He went over to the hole in the brick wall and helped Sarah through into the wardroom. They both stopped for a moment, shaking the rain off as much as possible.

  “Wow, it’s darker than I thought it would be,” Sarah said. She bit her lip, thinking. “You know, they left a lot of chemicals behind here—all those bottles you brought to Dr. Diaz.”

  “Yeah?” he said.

  “Well, maybe we can find some sodium,” Sarah said. “Back in the twenties, they would’ve used it to make sodium chlorite for bleach, and sodium nitrite for food preservation.”

  “So you think they left some pure sodium around and it hasn’t exploded by now?” Ethan asked skeptically. “Water hits that stuff, it goes boom.”

  “We would only need a tiny bit. You know, it was still dry in the sterilization room upstairs. The roof and walls on most of this building are intact. If they had sodium, they would’ve known to keep it in something safe.”

  Ethan nodded slowly. “There’s a room at the other side of the lobby, at the very end of the downstairs hall. It was a storeroom or something. I didn’t bother looking at it too closely, but I know it has metal cabinets locked up tight. If there are explosive chemicals down here, that’s where they’d be.”

  He took Sarah’s hand and led her through the dark to the storeroom. He used an empty fire extinguisher to break the lock on the nearest cabinet. They both leaned forward to study the fading labels on the bottles, which were nearly impossible to make out in the light of a watch.

  “Alcohol,” Sarah said, grabbing a bottle. “We can use it to make the torch.” She left Ethan to keep searching, and went back out into the lobby. The huge windows gave her a little more light to go by. She rooted around, searching for something to burn, finally finding some decaying sheets in the wardroom. She began wrapping the rags around a broom handle. She could pour the alcohol over it, and as long as they managed to make a spark, they’d have light.

  “Outrageously dangerous light,” she muttered. “But light.”

  “You ready?” Ethan called. “I’ve got a tiny chip of what I think is sodium, and a beaker filled with rainwater. I’d really like a pair of goggles right about now.”

  “Bring it out here,” she called back.

  Ethan appeared, his face apprehensive. He set the beaker down on the marble floor in the middle of the lobby. “Here goes nothin’.” He dropped the small chunk of sodium into the beaker, and they both jumped back as a flame shot straight up three feet in the air. Sarah shoved the makeshift torch into the flame. It exploded into a bright fire that startled her so much she almost dropped the handle.

  “Yup, that was sodium,” Ethan said drily. “We’d better go before this thing burns out.” He took the torch from her and led the way to the stairwell that went underground. At the bottom was a thick door. Ethan pushed it open and they stepped into a pitch-black basement.

  “That way is the staircase down to the beach.” Ethan held the torch out in front of them, and Sarah could just make out the vague outline of another door in the distance. “It leads to an inside stairwell of about fifty feet, and then you’re on the outside stairs the rest of the way down.”

  “Sounds scary.”

  “Actually that staircase is pretty well maintained, because security uses it,” Ethan said. “That’s where the dinghy is.” He started to the left across the dark basement. The main room narrowed quickly into a hallway, and after a hundred feet or so, the walls became rougher, and the floor matched.

  “This part isn’t really finished,” she said.

  “It’s carved out of the bedrock of the island. My theory is they used it to get back and forth from the patient areas to the doctors’ housing when it was too cold outside,” Ethan said. “Or it was for the servants to get back and forth with laundry and stuff for the doctors. They didn’t bother to pave it over with anything.”

  After another few minutes of walking, a sudden gust of cold air hit them, and the torch sputtered. Ethan stopped.

  Sarah gasped. A pile of rock lay covering almost the entire tunnel, and on the right, the wall was gone, revealing nothing but open air.

  “Here’s the cave-in,” Ethan said.

  “Thanks, Captain Obvious,” she replied. “We’re still pretty high up.” She gazed out over the ocean, its waves crashing loudly somewhere below. She couldn’t even see the beach. Without the wall, they were standing on an open shelf halfway up the sheer bluff.

  “The only way through is to climb over the rocks,” Ethan said. “I have no idea how big a cave-in it is. I couldn’t see the other side even when I was here in the daytime.”

  “Let’s go, then, before the storm blows out the torch.” And before I have time to rethink this, she silently added. If she slipped on the wet rocks, she would fall all the way down to the beach. She would end up like Nate.

  Ethan handed her the torch, then he began slowly climbing along the pile of rubble in their path. Sarah watched where he put his hands, where he found footholds, and how he balanced, memorizing every move he made. When he got five feet away, he turned and carefully reached back for the torch. Then he held it for Sarah while she climbed after him, re-creating each step he’d taken.

  And then they did it all again. And again.

  By the time they crested the heap of rock and the wall between them and the ocean reappeared, Sarah couldn’t tell if they’d been climbing for ten minutes or three hours. Not one of the more
enriching experiences the school had to offer, she thought wryly as they began inching their way down the other side of the rock pile. But maybe she could write her college essay on how she—and her sidekick—brought down a corrupt corporation.

  “The tunnel is intact here,” Ethan spoke up, pulling her out of her stress-induced fantasy. She handed over the torch and forced herself to concentrate on the last few steps.

  “I’ve never been so happy to see a long, dark, creepy hole in the ground,” she breathed, sinking to the cold floor.

  “I hope I’m right that this leads under that collapsed building.” Ethan was joking, but she could hear the strain in his voice. He was as exhausted as she was.

  “That torch doesn’t have long left,” she said after they’d rested a few moments. “We better move.”

  They dragged themselves up and started through the tunnel again, the makeshift torch burning lower with each step. Within two minutes, they were completely in the dark.

  “Okay, we’re on watch light from here on out,” Ethan said. The glow from his watch only managed to illuminate about six inches in front of them, but they walked quickly. Sarah didn’t care if she tripped over something in the dark; she just didn’t want to be trapped down here with no light at all.

  “Look,” she whispered after a few minutes. “Up ahead.”

  Ethan shut his watch off and they both peered into the darkness. “Yeah, that’s light,” he said.

  “What are we even expecting to find?” Sarah asked as they inched toward the dim glow. “The basement of the wrecked doctors’ building?”

  “I guess. Though why Izzy would be there, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t think … you don’t think they brought her there to kill her, do you?” Sarah asked. “If they don’t want anyone to know their student experiments are so fucked up, they might get rid of her to hide the evidence.”

  “It’s possible. But there would be easier ways to kill her—they could’ve just tossed her off the bluffs,” Ethan said.

  The light grew stronger and stronger, and suddenly Sarah realized that the floor wasn’t rough stone anymore. The walls were finished with drywall. And the glow came from soft green emergency lighting running along the ceiling.