Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  “This is not the basement of an abandoned ruin,” Ethan said.

  “There are windows up ahead.” Sarah pointed. Along the wall of what was now a hallway ran a series of long windows. But the windows were on the left, away from the outside of the island. Away from the bluff and the beach. “If they’re not windows to the outside, what are they?” she asked.

  “I don’t know, but there’s light coming from inside. Those two guys might be close. We need to be quiet.” Ethan eased up to the first window and dropped to his knees underneath it. Sarah followed suit. They slowly raised themselves up until they could look over the bottom edge.

  Sarah couldn’t understand what she was seeing.

  A huge room spread out beneath them, the floor at least twenty feet below. It was the size of an auditorium, and along the far wall were large monitors, one right next to the other in a straight line from one end of the room to the other. A second row of monitors ran right beneath them. Under each pair of monitors was a workstation, and at each workstation sat a person.

  “Holy crap.” Sarah dropped back down, her heart hammering in her chest. “There are a lot of people in there.”

  Ethan crouched down next to her. “What the hell is this?”

  “That room is huge, and it’s inside the bluffs,” Sarah said. “This hallway must be an emergency exit or something.”

  “There’s got to be a door to stairs along this hall somewhere. We’re lucky it’s empty up here. There’s no place to hide.” Ethan shook his head in amazement. “The whole thing is underground. It’s built into the rock just like the POW camp was.”

  “Ethan. Did you see the monitors?” Sarah asked.

  “Sort of. I mean, I saw them but I was distracted by the people.”

  “There are people on the monitors, too,” Sarah said. “We have to take another look.”

  They inched back up and peered into the room. “Every monitor has a different face on it,” Sarah said.

  “That’s Logan,” Ethan gasped. “He’s asleep.”

  “Oh my god. The next one is Kayla,” Sarah said. A feeling of revulsion crept up inside her as she scanned the other monitors. “And Harrison. And Luke, and Hazel, and Cody … It’s almost the whole Wolfpack. All of them asleep in bed. What the fuck? What’s going on?”

  Ethan clapped his hand over her mouth. “Quiet, we can’t get caught.”

  Sarah nodded, and he moved his hand. “These people are watching them. They’re in their dorm rooms, thinking they’re in private, but somehow these people are spying on them,” Sarah whispered.

  “It’s not just the Wolfpack. There’s that walking block of granite from the Lobsters. And that other walking block of granite from the Lobsters,” Ethan said. “I never bothered to learn their names.”

  “And there’s Maya!” Sarah exclaimed softly. “Ethan, look at the monitors on the bottom. They’re scrolling information.”

  Ethan squinted, studying the monitors. “Numbers, chemicals … they’re monitoring hormone levels or something.”

  “It’s the same information I saw on the computer in Izzy’s treatment room,” Sarah said. “Where I saw Bromcyan listed.”

  “No wonder they brought Izzy here. This whole place is some kind of observation center, built underground so nobody would know about it.” Ethan sounded stunned. “And you know what? I bet if we’d gone out the other side of that treatment room, we would have ended up someplace in this complex. It’s where that people mover under the Admin building goes. It makes sense that they wouldn’t tromp across the fields every time they wanted to bring somebody over here.”

  “Gotta be,” Sarah agreed, but she was more interested in what was on the monitors. Her gaze traveled from the sleeping faces of her friends, down over the monitors scrolling biological information about them, to a sign on the wall over each workstation. Numbers and letters. Over Logan’s workstation was the number Xk48B. Kayla’s was Xm01Q. Harrison’s was Yk88L.

  Those are their ID numbers, Sarah realized, remembering the number the nurse had used to put Izzy on standby. I thought it was a password, but it wasn’t. It was Izzy’s ID number.

  “All these people are like Izzy. They’re all being controlled somehow. Those signs are their identification numbers.” As the words left Sarah’s mouth, she stopped being afraid.

  Now she was angry.

  “Come on. I want to see what else they’re hiding down here,” Sarah said. She crawled along the hallway, keeping below the windows, and Ethan followed. They came to a door, but Sarah ignored it. It would lead into the big monitor room they’d just seen. But the hallway was so long she couldn’t even see the end of it. There had to be more. Once they’d passed all the windows, they stood up to walk.

  “That room had at least twenty people in it, easy,” Ethan said. “Why is it so quiet in this hall? You must be right, it’s an emergency exit.”

  “There’s a door up there on the right,” Sarah said, pointing. “The only thing to the right of us is the ocean.”

  “Open that door, you’ll find stairs down to the beach,” Ethan said. “Maybe I was wrong about how the security guys got out to that dinghy. Maybe they just came from here.”

  “It’s good for us,” Sarah said. “If they don’t use this hall much, we have a chance of finding Izzy and getting her out without being caught.”

  “And what then?” Ethan asked. “Sarah, they’re controlling her. What do we do with her?”

  Sarah grimaced. “I don’t know. But we can’t leave her here to be tortured.”

  Ethan nodded. “More windows,” he said, gesturing ahead.

  They inched up to the new set of windows and peeked through. It was a different room, but just as big. This one had a series of modular clean rooms set up in rows, each with an elaborate filtering system set up on the top. There were enough rooms for many scientists to work here at the same time. Right now there were only three people—two in white clean room suits that covered their entire bodies, working with an electron microscope, and one woman on her own operating a mechanical arm inside of a smaller Plexiglas box.

  Sarah found herself so fascinated with them that she didn’t pay attention to the equipment in the lab. She could see in a glance that it was hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of machinery. But she couldn’t tear her gaze away from these three people, who got to play with all this stuff. In another life, these three would have been like rock stars to her—people doing cutting-edge research, using state-of-the-art equipment, making life-changing discoveries.

  “How can they stand there acting like it’s a job when there are people being experimented on without knowing it?” Sarah exploded.

  “I don’t know. But this is all biotech equipment. Microarray scanners, CO2 incubators, I see at least five different centrifuges. And there’s a 3-D printing setup over there that’s … honestly, I can’t even imagine what that’s doing.”

  “I don’t care.” Sarah stormed on down the hallway, barely even caring if one of the scientists happened to glance up at the windows and see them. She stopped in surprise when the hall suddenly took a left turn.

  “Looks like the fun continues deeper under the island,” Ethan said. “Have we seen enough?”

  Sarah shook her head. “We still don’t have proof. Without our cells we can’t take any pictures. And we haven’t found Izzy.”

  “Every minute we stay here we risk getting caught,” Ethan pointed out.

  But she kept going, and Ethan followed her reluctantly. The hall ended in a staircase down, so she followed it. At the bottom were a series of small rooms—testing rooms. MRI machines, CT Scanners, X-rays, and three different state-of-the-art operating rooms.

  “And to think, we all considered the dinky little infirmary to be a phenomenal setup,” Ethan said drily.

  Sarah shivered. “It’s freezing.”

  Ethan was in front of her now, peering through a window in the door at the end of the hall. “It’s the servers. They have to be kept cold.
”

  Frowning, she walked up next to him and looked through the window. This room was so vast she couldn’t even see the back wall. It was entirely filled with servers. The only lights were the same greenish emergency lights that ran along the hallway, and something about the tall black servers in the darkened room gave her the creeps. Why would the Fortitude Corporation need something like this? They’d clearly spent billions of dollars building this place and hiding it from everyone. For what? Not innovative therapy treatments, that was for sure.

  “Biotech equipment, student experiment subjects, a Google-worthy server room. Why?” she asked despite knowing Ethan was just as baffled.

  “This is the end of the hall,” Ethan said. He gestured to the stairs that led up. “Do we go up or go back?”

  “Go up,” she told him.

  He took her hand and squeezed it, and Sarah felt a rush of gratitude. Whatever was happening, they were in it together. She left her hand tightly grasped in Ethan’s as they climbed up the new stairs. This flight was longer than the one they’d taken down. Sarah wondered if they were climbing all the way back up to the surface.

  At the top was a small landing. A narrow corridor ran off to the right, and a shorter flight of stairs led to a metal door in front of them marked EXIT. A small, hysterical laugh escaped Sarah at the normalcy of the sign amid the utter insanity surrounding them.

  “I hear something.” Ethan turned to the small corridor. “Down here.”

  Sarah could hear it, too. Voices. “People. Should we turn around?”

  A shrill, loud scream cut through the low hum of talking. Sarah and Ethan exchanged wide-eyed glances before sprinting toward the sound.

  A door swung open in front of them, and they skidded to a stop just as a woman dressed in scrubs stepped out. She looked at them, mouth open in shock.

  Sarah punched her in the face.

  When the woman hit the floor, Ethan jumped on top of her, covering her mouth with his hand. “Find something to tie her up with,” Ethan said frantically.

  Sarah didn’t stop to think. She grabbed the door and pulled it back open. Inside was a wardroom filled with patient beds, almost all full. At the far end of the room, a guy in scrubs fought to restrain someone, so Sarah took a chance and dropped to the ground behind the closest bed.

  She looked up at the patient, and had to bite her lip to keep from screaming. It was an old man, white-gray hair, one eye. Where the other eye should be was just a socket filled with ropy white-and-pink scars. His good eye—brown—stared at her lifelessly, and he was laughing soundlessly. Or was he trying to talk? Sarah couldn’t tell. She crawled away quickly, scanning the area for rope or medicine. The screaming from the far end of the room kept going.

  The next bed held a large woman, black, maybe forty, with a shaved head and a gash above one ear. Her left leg was missing below the thigh, and she was asleep, drooling. Sarah saw that she was hooked up to an IV, and even though she was restrained, she didn’t seem likely to wake up.

  Carefully, Sarah undid the strong Velcro restraint around her arm, hoping the shrieks would cover the sound of it ripping open. She took the restraint and started to move away—just as the woman’s eyes opened.

  Freaked out, Sarah stood up. The whole ward was filled with mutilated people—missing limbs, missing eyes, covered in scars. Every single one of them was tied to their metal bed. Over each bed hung a number, just like the numbers in the monitor room. The place reeked of urine and feces and blood and bleach, and the screaming hadn’t stopped.

  Sarah looked at the patient fighting off the guy in scrubs. Blond hair flew everywhere as her hands raked at him like claws. He’d gotten her legs clamped down under the metal straps like they had in the treatment room, but her arms were free. She grabbed his forearm and sank her teeth into it. He grabbed a handful of her long hair and jerked her away, slamming her down onto the bed. She kept screaming, white spittle flying from her mouth.

  Izzy.

  Sarah turned and ran.

  In the corridor, Ethan sat on the nurse, desperation in his eyes. “Here.” Sarah grabbed the nurse’s hands, pulled them behind her back, and wrapped the restraint around her wrists. “I still need a gag.” She took hold of Ethan’s shirt and tore off a long strip of fabric, then tied it around the woman’s mouth.

  “What are we going to do with her?” he asked.

  “Throw her outside the exit. The other nurse will find her eventually.”

  Ethan raised an eyebrow questioningly.

  “They’ve got people tied to the beds, hacked to bits in there. God knows what they’re using them for, but it’s nothing good and it’s nothing legal. And they have Izzy in there,” she snapped, glaring at the nurse. “This one can handle being out in the rain for a bit.”

  “You’re the boss.” Ethan picked up the nurse, slung her over his shoulder, and hurried back to the door. Sarah opened it just enough to get a brief glimpse of the rain on the crumbling ruins above them. A short cement staircase led from the door up to the ground outside. Ethan propped the nurse on the stairs, and Sarah pulled the door shut, locking her out.

  “You’ve been right all along. We have to get off this island,” Sarah said. “It’s like a horror movie in there. We’ll just have to figure out how to convince the cops to come back.”

  Ethan didn’t answer. He simply took off running.

  Sarah followed.

  Back down the stairs, past the server room and the MRI machines. Up the next staircase, past the bio lab and back toward the monitor room. The outside door loomed up on their left, and Ethan hurled himself against it. Sarah followed him out, barely even noticing how slippery the metal stairs were on the way down. She just hung on to the railing and prayed that nobody would find that nurse until they were far away from here.

  On the beach, reality caught up with her. The wind was still strong, and the waves pounded with frightening strength against the rocky shore. “We can’t get on a boat in this,” she yelled.

  “We have zero options,” Ethan yelled back. He was already running down the beach toward the old asylum. Sarah followed, struggling to run through the mix of wet rocks and sand. Before they’d gotten too far, she made out a battered dock jutting out into the water. Upside down on the dock, tied with a thick rope, was a tiny rowboat.

  “No. No no no no,” Sarah cried. “That is a rowboat. This is the ocean in a huge storm!”

  “Do you want to end up like Izzy? They’re going to find that nurse any second, if they haven’t already,” Ethan yelled over the roaring of the waves. He unwound the rope and turned the rowboat over.

  Sarah closed her eyes, forcing herself to push the panic down. Panicking wouldn’t help.

  “Sarah.” Ethan’s voice was quiet, close. She opened her eyes, finding his face inches from hers. He leaned forward, resting his forehead against hers. “I know you’re scared. I am too.”

  “This is suicide,” she whispered.

  “But if we stay, it’s worse than death,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to Karina, but I’m willing to bet she was in that room with Izzy. Maybe Philip is too. I don’t want to end up there, Sarah.”

  “Me either.”

  “If we can get to the floating wind farm, we’ll be safe. The worst of the storm is over,” he said. “We just have to get to the wind farm.”

  Sarah nodded. “Okay.”

  “The hardest thing is going to be to keep off the shore,” he told her. “The waves will push us back in. There’s a motor, but I don’t know if it’ll be strong enough.”

  He pulled her into a quick hug before hauling the boat up and dropping it into the water at the end of the dock. Shaking, Sarah climbed down the wooden ladder and managed to get her feet in the boat. She sat down fast, clinging to the sides, trying not to retch from the motion of the waves. Ethan jumped down after her.

  “Ready?”

  She felt tears on her cheeks, warm against the cold wet of the rain, but she nodded. She’d thought she h
ad no choices growing up, but those people in the lab truly had no control over their lives. Ethan was right. She’d rather die than live with every movement dictated by some demented scientist.

  Ethan pulled the motor, turning it on with a sputter that seemed pathetic against the roaring wind. “Look!” Sarah yelled, pointing at lights on the bluffs. Flashlights in the darkness, pointing in every direction.

  “They’re too far away to see us,” Ethan yelled back, steering the boat out to sea.

  Sarah held on tight to the sides and kept her eyes on the lights. The swells were high, and almost immediately began pushing them back toward shore, just like Ethan had said. “Hold the tiller!”

  Sarah scrambled over next to Ethan and held the tiller the way he showed her. He grabbed an oar and struggled to keep them off the rocks. They made it free and got out to open water—

  Only to have the waves hurl them back into the rocky stretch near the shore again. And again.

  At least we’ve moved away from the asylum and the Fortitude lab, Sarah thought. If we could survive being slammed back onto the shore, maybe we could hide on the island for another few hours before they found us. We could try again when the weather’s calmer.

  The third time they made it to open water, the motor cut out.

  “Damn it!” Ethan struggled to make it turn over, but it didn’t work. They both picked up the oars, fighting against the tide. Sarah knew it was a losing battle, but that didn’t mean she was going to stop trying.

  Suddenly a spotlight shone on them, so bright that it dazzled her eyes. It bathed the entire boat in light. She slowly put down the oar. Ethan did too, defeated. They were caught.

  “Stay where you are, we’re throwing a rope to you,” a voice announced through a megaphone.

  “Maybe we should jump in the water,” Ethan said.

  “No way,” she replied. “You obviously don’t know this, but poor black girls don’t learn to swim.”

  He gave a crooked smile. The rope splashed into the water next to them, and Ethan leaned over to fish it out of the ocean. He tied it to the boat, and Sarah felt them being reeled in toward the bright light.