Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  “No, no. I won’t let them in again.”

  A frightening thought hit Sarah. “Ethan, he needs Bromcyan. It’s the only way he can cope. If we succeed, if we burn this place down and he doesn’t have it, he’ll be stuck this way.”

  “Dr. D, where do you keep your medicine?” Ethan asked.

  “They bring it to me every morning, but I won’t let them.” He shook his head hard, and tears ran down his cheeks.

  “Damn. They bring it from someplace else.” Ethan bit his lip, thinking.

  “They’ll have a store of it in the underground lab,” Sarah said. It was what they were both thinking, she knew. Neither one of them wanted to say it. “We have to get some for him before we get off the island.”

  Ethan sighed. He looked at Dr. Diaz and nodded. “As much as we can carry. When we’re safe, and he’s stable, he can figure out how to make more of it. It really is the answer.”

  “So … we start it all, and then we go to the lab during the chaos?” Sarah asked.

  “We’re not going to get a better chance,” Ethan said. “At least we can catch a ride through the tunnel this time.”

  She nodded, tension already tightening her muscles. “Let’s get this over with.” Sarah knelt in front of Dr. Diaz. “Dr. D, it’s going to be okay. You trust me, right? I’m your friend.”

  He licked his lips. “Yes,” he whispered.

  “Good. Everything will be all right. We’re going to fix things around here. I just need to borrow your cell.” She had the codes. Maybe she could use the cell in ways Dr. Diaz couldn’t.

  His brow furrowed. “I promise it will be okay,” she said.

  Dr. Diaz held out his cell, and she took it from his shaking hand. She glanced down at the screen. “It’s totally different from ours.”

  Ethan took the cell and studied it. “Dave just seemed to type a command. Give me a number,” Ethan said.

  “Logan is Xk48B,” Sarah said, closing her eyes to help herself picture the sign near his monitor.

  Ethan chuckled. “It’s like the ancient locks on places we’re not supposed to go. Fortitude is so sure they’ve got us all controlled that they don’t bother with security on things we’re not supposed to touch. They’re cocky.”

  “Why? What do you mean?” Sarah asked.

  “I just typed in Logan’s number, and that’s all I needed to do. No password or anything.” Ethan handed her the cell. On the screen was the ID followed by the word “Command.” Underneath it was an image of Logan in the dining hall, laughing and talking. Along the bottom, information scrolled—hormone levels.

  “Is there anywhere they’re not monitoring us?” she asked. “They can probably see us right now.”

  Ethan took back the cell, and his thumbs flew over the keys. “No, they only monitor the ones with nanotech this way,” Ethan said. “I just checked myself. Everyone else is still only a potential candidate. They probably only want to spend the money on the confirmed ones, the ones they’ve implanted.”

  He hit a few more keys and handed it back with Logan called up. “I guess if they could see us, they would’ve been onto us sooner than this,” Sarah said. Her finger hovered over Logan’s face. “What command should I give?”

  “You said the command for standby was just ‘standby,’” Ethan replied. “Keep it simple.”

  “Here goes, then.” Sarah typed one word into the command box: Burn.

  Next came Kayla. Xm01Q. Burn. Harrison. Yk88L. Burn. The first lacrosse player. Xm33G. Burn. The second lacrosse player. Yl20H. Burn. Maya. Xl48F. Burn.

  Sarah floated somewhere in between reality and her memory of the monitor room—green emergency lights shining down on her, the smell of the ocean mixing with acrid chemicals, her heart pounding with fear and anger, the sleeping faces of students on the monitors. She read their ID numbers in the memory, and typed them in reality. Then she switched to the numbers she’d seen in the horrible ward room where they’d put Izzy, the numbers over all the beds. One after another, until she’d done them all.

  Burn.

  Last, she typed in Izzy’s number. Xk32R. Sarah hesitated for a moment, and then she wrote a different word.

  Fight.

  21

  The first fire started two minutes later. Sarah heard a rushing sound outside the office window, followed by shouting.

  Ethan locked eyes with her. “That’s our cue.”

  Sarah turned to Dr. Diaz. “We have to go now. You need to get out of the building and go down to the jetty. Can you do that, Dr. D?”

  He nodded, a short, frightened nod. She wasn’t sure he’d be able to handle it, but there was nothing else she could do. She kissed him gently on the cheek. “We’ll meet you there, and it will be okay. I promise.”

  “Another fire in the hallway,” Ethan said from the door. “We have to go.”

  Sarah ran over, not letting herself look back at poor Dr. Diaz. The hall was filled with kids running and screaming, and smoke poured from a room way down at the other end. The fire alarm started to blare, and she and Ethan rushed from the building as part of a frightened crowd.

  “I hope nobody gets hurt,” she panted as they hurried down the long narrow steps that led to the passageway between the Admin building and the secret lab.

  “Me too. But we have to just stay focused on getting the Bromcyan,” Ethan replied. He jerked open the door, and they got on the people mover. It probably was going about twenty-five miles per hour, but it felt like they would never get to the other end

  “Hold up. Who knows where the fires are on this side?” Sarah said when they finally—finally, finally—reached the other end, jumped out of the pod, and ran to the door. “I don’t know if any of those patients could follow the command. They were all restrained. And we don’t even know if any of them had the nanotech.”

  Ethan pressed his palm flat against the door. “It’s not hot.”

  When they entered the room, Sarah could almost hear Izzy screaming, as if the walls had absorbed the hideous sounds. She bolted to the door on the opposite side of the table where Izzy had been restrained. This time she was the one who felt the door. It wasn’t warm. Cautiously, she pulled it open. The sounds of terrified cries immediately hit her, and when she pulled in a breath, smoke filled her lungs.

  “The ward!” Instinctively, she turned in the direction of the cries and shrieks, thinking of those people strapped to their beds. If a few of them had managed to set fires, the rest of them were sitting ducks. Why hadn’t she thought of that? She started to run again, the smoke thickening, burning her eyes.

  “We don’t have time to do anything but get the Bromcyan,” Ethan protested.

  “We can’t just leave them there! They’ll die. And the bio lab is close to the ward,” she answered.

  A door to the left burst open, and a nurse flew out, her face a mask of fear. The sounds of the screams intensified, and now Sarah could hear the roar of the fire. “Untie me!” someone begged, while someone else let out a howl of sheer panic. The nurse had to have come from the ward. “Turn around!” Sarah yelled. “Get the restraints off your patients.”

  “She’s killing people,” the nurse screamed back, without slowing down.

  “Who?”

  A shrill scream pierced the air as Sarah reached the open door. She was right. It was the ward. A few beds were empty, and burning, their occupants gone. The rest of the people lay strapped down, moaning and coughing. All except Izzy.

  Sarah’s command had worked. Izzy had gotten free of her restraints, and she was beating a nurse with an IV pole. The guy was on the floor already, and his head was bloody. “Oh my god,” Sarah said. Next to the nurse lay a security guard, his eyes open and unseeing. Another guard crawled, wounded, toward the door.

  Sarah ran to the closest bed and freed one of the patient’s wrists. “We can’t untie everyone. We have to get to the Bromcyan,” Ethan urged, coughing. “And Izzy will kill us if she catches us.”

  As if she’d heard him, Izzy�
�s head snapped toward them. Her blue eyes lit up with rage, and she dropped the pole. Screaming again, she rushed in their direction.

  Ethan yanked Sarah out a door near a bank of monitors and slammed it closed. There was an old dead bolt on the top, and he shoved it into place.

  “We can’t leave her there,” Sarah cried.

  “She’s beating people to death. That’s the command she’s following. And she’s hopped up on adrenaline. This door won’t hold her for long,” Ethan retorted. “Sarah. We got her free, and that’s all we could do. She. Will. Kill. Us.”

  “You’re right.” Sarah thought she spotted a staircase through the smoke. “The lab should be down there.” She started down the hall. She was moving so fast when she hit the stairs that she stumbled down the first few steps before she could catch herself on the railing.

  “Sarah?” Ethan called. The smoke was too thick for them to see each other.

  “I’m here,” she called back. “Meet at the bottom of the stairs.”

  She made her way to the bottom. “We have to hurry. There will be better ventilation in the lab area,” he said when he joined her. “I still don’t even know what’s burning.”

  “If we need to, we can use the beach exit in this direction.” Every step they’d taken the last time they were in the building was locked in her brain. They ran past the server room and the medical machines. Through the safety glass of the window, they saw that one of the MRI rooms was filled with flames, the only thing containing them the thick fire door.

  They ran faster. Up the next staircase and down the hall to the bio lab. Sarah’s nostrils and throat felt singed by the smoke. Ethan shoved open the lab door after a fast check, and they hurried down the stairs into the clean room area. There were so many ventilators in here that the smoke wasn’t as bad, but Sarah still couldn’t see any kind of storage room.

  “There’s the front door,” Ethan said, pointing ahead. “We didn’t see the main part of this complex, we only stayed in the service hallway. Maybe there’s storage out here.”

  “Worth a shot,” she replied. They pushed through the main door of the lab and found themselves in what looked like a hospital hallway. An alarm was blaring, and the overhead fluorescent lights were harsh compared to the green emergency lighting they’d come from. People ran, coughing.

  “This way.” Sarah spotted a door with a biohazard symbol and ran for it. She opened the door, glanced inside, and knew she’d found the right place. Rows of metal cabinets lined the room, thick Plexiglas windows showing what was inside. It only took a minute to locate the Bromcyan. There were hundreds of bottles of it.

  Ethan grabbed a metal transport case from a shelf and began stuffing it with Bromcyan. Sarah did the same. “It’s not refrigerated,” she said. “It should be okay to transport, don’t you think?”

  “Who knows?” he replied, then broke down into a coughing fit. “I can barely breathe, Sarah. We have to get out of here.”

  “We just left the lab. The monitor room was the next one down,” Sarah replied. “We need to go there first.”

  She didn’t wait for him to reply, she just ran. A hundred yards down the hall was the entrance to the huge room where Fortitude kept track of their test subjects. It had been abandoned, because the far side of the room was on fire. Flames leapt to the ceiling, engulfing the metal stairs that led up to the emergency exit hallway. “Crap,” Sarah muttered. She raced over to the nearest workstation, praying that it would still function.

  The computer awoke at her touch, and Sarah frantically typed in the ID numbers of all the people she’d ordered to burn. After each one, her fingers flying over the keys, she added a new command: Escape.

  With a horrible creaking sound, the wall on the far side collapsed, taking part of the high ceiling with it.

  “We’re done,” Ethan said. He grabbed Sarah’s hand and hauled her away from the computer, out of the monitor room, one step ahead of the billowing black smoke, and back down the hallway past the lab. “Follow the running people,” he gasped. “The lab is next to the monitor room. Once the flames reach it, this whole place will blow. We have to find a way out.”

  The smoke was so dark that Sarah couldn’t make out any running people. Heat hit her like a body blow. There were screams in the blackness, and someone was crying. She let go of Ethan’s hand to grope in front of her, the other hand clinging to the case of Bromcyan. Finally a red light pierced the smoke. Red means exit, Sarah thought, moving that way. She stumbled, wheezing, a few more feet, and then she was outside, the door propped open, a cement staircase in front of her. Sarah climbed it on her hands and knees. The sudden influx of cleaner air made her feel light-headed, but she knew she had to get to the surface.

  Finally, exhausted, she reached the top of the steps and crawled up onto the grass. “Ethan?” she croaked.

  “Oh, he’s right here,” said a voice that she had never wanted to hear again.

  Sarah sat up, blinking to clear her aching eyes. Ethan stood about five feet away, the case of Bromcyan at his feet, and a gun at his head.

  Horrified, Sarah looked up into Dave’s face. His suit was just as expensive as the last one, but his tie was askew and his face was smudged with soot. The gun in his hand shook a little as it pressed against Ethan’s temple.

  Sarah rose to her feet, her hands out pleadingly. “Dave, no…”

  “Was this your doing?” Dave spat, his pretend friendliness gone, his expression filled with fury. “Do you have any idea how much money you’ve just cost us?”

  “Money?” she repeated in disbelief.

  “You know what, you little brat, we aren’t done here,” Dave spat. “I can’t kill you because your father would be pissed, but Ethan is another story.”

  “What?” she cried.

  That got Dave’s attention, and he lowered the gun slightly. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t know. Did I forget to mention that dear old dad works for Fortitude, Sarah? Surprise!”

  “My father’s been dead for years,” she whispered. “You killed him, you son of a bitch.”

  “Wrong,” Dave snapped. “Of course, he doesn’t know we found you, Ms. Johnson. You stayed off the radar for years with that fake name. Too bad you couldn’t keep your brilliant memory from outing you.”

  Merson, she thought, her head spinning. Tell them your name is Sarah Merson. Merson. Her father’s voice saying that to her. Her father’s rules for what to do if something bad happened. Her father.

  “You can’t save your boyfriend here, but if you play nice maybe you can have a tearful reunion with Daddy—after I beat the crap out of you.”

  Dave pressed the gun back against Ethan’s head and cocked it, jerking Sarah out of her shock. She saw Ethan’s blue eyes filled with fear and love. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. Dave was going to kill another person that she loved, and she would have to watch. Again.

  Izzy flew out of the smoke-filled stairwell like she’d been shot out of a cannon. Her chest was heaving, but she was on her feet, her hands covered in blood, a scalpel in her grip. Her face was wild. She turned on Sarah, who was closest to her.

  She’s going to kill me, Sarah thought.

  “Izzy, no!” she yelled. “It’s not me, it’s him.” She pointed at Dave, hoping with all her might that some scrap of the real Izzy was still there inside this wild animal. “He’s the one in your head! He’s the one doing it!”

  Izzy’s crazed eyes moved to Dave. Her lips twitched like a dog getting ready to bare its teeth.

  Dave’s brow furrowed, and dread flitted across his face. Suddenly Ethan grabbed Dave’s gun hand and jerked it down toward the ground. With a cry, Dave fell forward, struggling to keep his grip on the gun. Ethan let go, ducking free … just as Izzy hurled herself at Dave.

  He tried to raise the gun again, but it was too late. Izzy snarled, tearing at him with one hand, stabbing him with the other. Dave shrieked and tried to fight her off, but she was freakishly strong. The scalpel plunged into him a
gain and again, and Sarah stumbled away, Ethan by her side, as blood spurted into the air.

  She refused to look back. The sounds alone were horrifying enough. With the screams and moans and cries filling her ears, she threw up on the grass.

  “Izzy, stop.” Ethan’s voice was steady, and when Sarah spun around she saw him holding the gun. It was pointed at Izzy, holding her at bay.

  Izzy smiled. It was a wide, crazed grin, nothing like the pretty smile of the posh girl Sarah had first met. Blood dripped from the scalpel in her hand. Her cheek was slashed, but she didn’t seem to notice. She just smiled … then turned and headed for the stairs.

  “Izzy, no,” Sarah cried. “It’s on fire down there. You’ll die.”

  Izzy kept walking, straight toward the stairway. Black smoke billowed around her, and flames licked at the cement.

  “Izzy!” Sarah screamed.

  But Izzy was gone. She’d taken the only true escape possible.

  EPILOGUE

  Sarah gripped the railing of the upper deck as the ferry plowed through the ocean, leaving firefighters behind to battle the flames that devoured Sanctuary Bay Academy. Soon there would be more ruins on the island. Added to the remains of an insane asylum and a POW camp would be the remnants of something that had appeared to be a school but wasn’t, and a high-tech underground lab most of the world didn’t know existed. She didn’t want to think of what might be built there next.

  In the distance, she heard a sound that reminded her of the centrifuge in the chem lab. “News helicopter,” Ethan said from beside her. “Fortitude won’t be able to cover up what happened to the school. They can cover up a lot, but not the fire.”

  She shivered, thinking of Izzy, thinking of Karina, thinking of Nate, and Ethan put his arm around her. At least Dr. Diaz had made it onto the boat. He was inside with an EMT who’d had to tranquilize him to get him on board. He had his supply of Bromcyan and Sarah had explained to the EMT that the medication was necessary to treat Dr. Diaz’s schizophrenia.