by Paul Draker
“Oh god, shut up.” She stood and walked to the window, pointing toward where the mainland lay hidden by the island’s upslope. “I saw an old farmhouse about a mile inland, across the channel from us. Probably built around the same time as these buildings. Julian and his crew are in there.”
Mason nodded. “That’s what I’m guessing, too.” His glasses were broken, one of the lenses shattered, the eye underneath it swollen and purple. He had an ugly cut on his chin, and bruises on his jaw and cheekbone. What a pair we must make, she thought. She probably had two black eyes herself: the swollen bridge of her nose was a blurry pinkness intruding on the bottom of her view.
He picked up a rolled poster and unrolled it on the counter near the window. “A submarine would have been cool, though—”
“Wait a minute,” Camilla said, pointing at a scientific report that lay on the floor. Dust lay thick on the concrete elsewhere, but it was disturbed where the report had been dropped facedown, cover open. The binding on this report was blue, unlike the beige or white ones she had seen so far. Staring at it, she felt a ripple of anxiety tighten the back of her neck.
“Hand me that one,” she said. “It looks different.”
CHAPTER 88
Lauren came to a stop and dropped her arms to her sides. She had come to a decision. She would not stand by powerless again while the situation around her spiraled further and further beyond recovery.
It felt good to take control, to take action.
Bouncing in place with nervous energy, she stared across the water at the mainland. Only three-quarters of a mile—a little longer than the swim in a sprint-length triathlon. The crosscurrent would make it more tiring, but she could do this. Easy.
Although the beach seemed extra crowded with seals today, the channel itself was surprisingly clear of them. That would make things easier for her.
She took two running steps into the surf and broke the water in a clean forward dive, surfacing just beyond the shore break to take a deep breath.
Strong kicks and even, powerful strokes of her arms carried her out into the strait.
Lauren struck out for the mainland, leaving Año Nuevo Island and its terrible uncertainties behind her.
CHAPTER 89
Mason handed Camilla the blue-bound report from the floor and then went back to the poster he had unrolled on the counter.
The blue-black corner of a photograph stuck out from between the center pages of the report. Camilla folded back the light blue cover, and her disquiet grew as she read the title page.
Año Nuevo 2011-2012 Seasonal Tracking and Predation Survey
Santa Cruz Pelagic Research Institute
Karen Anderson, PhD
Jacob Horowitz, PhD
Heather Stevens, PhD
Dmitry Kuznetsov, DSc
“You need to see this,” Mason said. He was no longer grinning.
She flipped the report closed, holding her place with her finger, and carried it over to the counter to look down at the map he held spread beneath his palms. The familiar seahorse shape of the island was a blank white space in the middle, surrounded by expanding contour lines showing ocean depth. Scattered amid the contour lines, dozens of X’s were jotted in pencil, with dates and coded notations beside them, clustering most densely in the channel between island and mainland.
He raised his eyes to meet hers. “There’s something else out there.”
“I know,” she said. “Something bad.”
A distant shout sounded through the open window: Jordan’s voice—an urgent command, with none of her usual coquetry.
“Juan, get over here. Right now!”
Through the window, Camilla watched Juan join Jordan at the top of the bluff. She pointed at something Camilla couldn’t see down below, on the beach or in the water. Raising his hand to shield his eyes, Juan stared where she was pointing. Then he grabbed her arm, and the two of them ran for the wooden stairs that led down to the beach.
Mason stared after them. “We’d have heard a boat…”
“Not a boat.” Camilla’s stomach clenched. “Lauren.”
She flipped the report open to the center, where several pages of taped photographs thickened the paper. One glance confirmed what she was afraid of. Camilla turned it so Mason could see the photographs. His eyes widened.
“That’s a lot of blood.”
CHAPTER 90
Stroke, stroke, stroke, breath. Stroke, stroke, stroke, breath…
Splashing through the waves, Lauren could hear indistinct shouts. On her next breath, she looked back over her shoulder. A cluster of figures stood at the end of the elevated walkway where it projected out over the water. At the front of the group, a tall man swept his arms over his head like a railroad signalman. Juan. The cheerleader stood beside him. In front of them, Camilla—the stripe of white tape across her broken nose visible even from here—was waving her back, shouting something. Lauren couldn’t make out the words. Mason was there, too, doing something weird: sticking his arms out in front of him and clapping his hands together straight up and down, with fingers hooked. Playing charades. Have fun, buddy.
Camilla grabbed at Mason. Jumping up and down, she pointed toward Lauren, her voice rising in pitch. She sounded hysterical now; the woman was practically screaming. Camilla thought swimming the channel was too dangerous? She didn’t get it at all. The real danger was there on the island with her. Christ, it might even be her.
Others were clambering down the stairs from the bluff: JT, Brent, Veronica… It looked as though everybody wanted her to turn back. Fuck that. She switched from a three-one rhythm to two-one, speeding up.
Stroke, stroke, breath. Stroke, stroke, breath.
She couldn’t trust any of them. Someone had put the carabiner in her pack. Someone had left the cut climbing rope on her pillow.
Oh Christ, she couldn’t think about that—not now. Lauren gasped, flooding her mouth with seawater.
In her mind’s eye, she could see Matt’s eyes clearly, bulging in terror as he stared up the line at her, seeing the knife in her hand, realizing what she intended.
“Please don’t do it, Lauren,” Matt sobbed. “I don’t want to die.”
Farther down the rope, Terry’s head hung back. His helmet was cracked, but his eyes were open too, staring at her out of his mask of blood. The glacier glistened white, a mile below his dangling feet. He shook his head from side to side, trying to speak, his eyes widening in horror as he watched Lauren slash at the line connecting the two of them to her waist harness, dragging her down.
Close to the middle of the channel now, Lauren sobbed. She pushed herself to swim even harder.
Stroke, stroke, breath, stroke, stroke, breath…
CHAPTER 91
“Fuck!” JT yelled, pushing past Camilla to grab Juan’s shoulder. “She can’t hear us. She’s not turning back.”
“She’s past the halfway point.” Juan changed his arm motions, waving Lauren forward.
Camilla’s legs shook. She reached behind her, groping for Mason’s wrist.
“She’s got this,” JT said. “She’s got it. Go on, girl—”
The water beneath Lauren erupted.
She was lifted high into the air, carried at the front of a gray-and-white torpedo shape the size of a small aircraft. It hung suspended above the water for a frozen second, crescent pectoral fins slicing through the air as it defied gravity. Then the massive shark fell back into the water with a deafening slap that echoed off the bluffs behind them. Plumes of white spray flew skyward.
Lauren was gone.
Camilla realized she was screaming: a high, piercing shriek that rolled out of her mouth, going on and on. She was powerless to stop it. Her fingers dug into Mason’s wrist.
JT dropped in front of her, knees thudding down onto the boards of the walkway. He grabbed the top of his shaved head with both hands. “Aww, hell no! Please, aww, no…”
A billowing red stain spread across the water where Lauren had disappeared.
<
br /> “Oh my god.” Jordan had both hands clamped over her mouth. Then she pointed. “She’s still alive.”
Camilla watched in horror as Lauren surfaced in the middle of the red stain, one arm flailing at the water.
Something floated on the surface at Lauren’s side. At first, Camilla’s mind refused to interpret what she was seeing; then she realized she was looking at Lauren’s legs. Lauren’s lower body was not aligned properly; it had come partially detached from her upper body, which still tried weakly to swim.
The cloud of red continued to spread, dyeing the water in a growing circle around her.
As if in the slow motion of a nightmare, Jordan’s pointing finger shifted. A short distance from the struggling swimmer, a disturbance swirled the water, then a gray triangle broke the surface. Glistening in the afternoon sun, it arced slowly around Lauren. A wide gray back, like the top of a car, crested beneath the dorsal fin, followed by the towering tail.
Down the shore, the elephant seals were in panicked motion, humping up the beach to get farther from the water. Even the alpha bulls seemed small, clumsy, and harmless to Camilla, now that the true apex predator had announced itself.
Sickle tail sweeping from side to side in a leisurely motion, the great white shark circled its prey.
CHAPTER 92
Lauren felt her mind growing sluggish. She wasn’t exactly sure what had happened, but she understood that she wasn’t going to make it across now. Sounds faded, getting farther and farther away, until all that was left was a muted whoosh in her ears, like the lingering aftereffect of a loud rock concert.
She had gotten hurt somehow. Very badly hurt—the water around her was red, and she could smell the sharp metallic tang of her own blood.
Somehow, she had also gotten turned around to face the island again. As her eyesight faded, she looked at the group of darkening figures on the walkway. They seemed to be watching her, their outlines blurring.
One of them was a liar, pretending to be someone they weren’t. But which of them was it?
Her last coherent thought broke apart.
CHAPTER 93
The shark circled Lauren. Her elbow splashed weakly once, twice, then stopped moving.
Mason gently pulled his wrist from Camilla’s grasp. Her fingers ached, and she realized she had probably hurt him. She looked away, meeting Veronica’s eyes.
Veronica’s expression was hard, her mouth pursed like she had bitten something bitter. She slowly shook her head.
Brent’s face was gray beneath his silver hair. He tucked his hands into his vest pockets and lowered his head, breathing heavily.
Juan released the breath he had been holding, and seemed to deflate. He put his hands on his hips and looked down at his feet.
A large seabird descended to splash at the edge of the expanding red circle around Lauren. A second bird followed, then a third. Hungry beaks snatched at scraps and tugged at loops of something floating in the water.
Camilla covered her mouth and began to weep quietly, staring at the nightmare scene unfolding in front of her.
Then the seabirds scattered, flapping away into the air again with raucous cries.
The great white shark tightened up its slow circle, moving in to feed.
CHAPTER 94
“…wrongful death, caused by your studio’s willful, unbelievably gross negligence.” Brent stepped forward, rapping the screen of the monitor with a knuckle. “I know you can hear me, Julian. The authorities need to be notified, right now. There are eight witnesses here.” He swept an arm to indicate all the contestants gathered in the central room of the Victorian house: everyone but Travis.
Everyone but Travis and Lauren. Camilla snuffled, wiped her running nose, and winced in pain, then looked absently at the blood on her hand. Did Julian even know what had just happened here?
“Every minute you delay just makes it worse,” Brent said. “All of us can corroborate the fact that you were repeatedly asked to send help for an earlier medical emergency. Repeatedly. This is—God damn you, somebody answer me!”
The monitor continued to display the scoreboard, mocking them with its silence.
Veronica shook her head, fear lending added intensity to her electric gaze. “It’s no good. They won’t let us talk to anybody until they figure out how to spin this.”
“They may not even know about Lauren,” Camilla said. “Whoever’s in charge over there probably turned off all the feeds the second Travis attacked me, and sent the camera crew home. They’re probably sitting in a conference room somewhere with Julian, planning damage control for a few injuries—not for getting someone killed.”
JT shoved Brent aside and faced the monitor.
“Listen up, you motherfuckers…” His tone was cold, cold. “Send. Somebody. Right. Now.” Veins stood out on his forehead. “Or I’m going to come track you down. I’ll find out who you are. I’ll find you all. You’ll pay for what happened to her—every sorry-assed one of you.”
Leaning against the wall with his arm around Jordan’s shoulders, Juan shook his head at JT in warning. Jordan herself looked upset, though surprisingly dry-eyed, and Camilla was struck by the memory of her tears on the day of the scavenger hunt. Shock over Lauren’s death had deadened Camilla’s emotions. Looking at Jordan no longer hurt. She could finally see her for who she really was: an icy beauty who could cry over her own hunger, but not over another person’s death.
The monitor blinked, going black for a second; then the scoreboard reappeared.
The room went silent.
The score in one cell began to change.
It scrolled rapidly down from eighteen, spinning through the teens, then through single digits, to stop at zero. The zero blinked slowly inside its square cell.
Lauren’s score.
Then Lauren’s entire cell disappeared from the scoreboard, leaving only nine scores showing.
PART III
ELIMINATION ROUND
CHAPTER 95
JT dropped his tote bag on the cot and unzipped it. He looked up at the corners of the ceiling, at the walls, but it would take too long to find where the cameras were hidden, or even how many of them there were. Fuck it.
He reached into his tote and pulled out the Glock. The thick-framed polymer handgun was chambered in .45 ACP—subsonic and heavy-hitting. Keeping his finger safely outside the trigger guard, he popped the full thirteen-round mag out and eyeballed the visible round. Then he butted the magazine back into the grip’s mag-well and hefted the firearm’s familiar, comforting weight.
Something had scared Lauren, but that wasn’t what made her run. She had run when she realized they were all alone on the island. He, too, understood what that meant.
Holding the Glock in a firing grip, he tapped the bottom of the magazine with the heel of his support hand and then racked the slide, releasing it to slam forward again. A quick press check showed the shiny brass of a chambered round. Then he raised the tail of his Hawaiian-print shirt and tucked the gun into his belt, snugged into the small of his back.
Somebody here was playing a different game than everybody else.
That person was responsible for Lauren’s death.
He or she would pay for it.
JT walked out of the room and down the stairs to join the others outside.
CHAPTER 96
“Microphones. Keep your voices low.” Camilla dropped the hidden camera onto the hard dirt at their feet.
The contestants stood outside in a circle, behind the two houses. The dark, moldering eaves and empty windows loomed over them, bearing silent witness. Everyone stared at the black object she had thrown down. A square plastic wafer with a shiny dome of glass in the center, it was connected by short wires to a plastic cube and a tiny metal cylinder. Lens, antenna and battery—the entire assembly would fit inside a matchbox.
Brent stepped forward and crushed the camera under his heel.
Juan dropped three more. “There are hundreds of them. Hidden every
where.”
“These are too small to transmit far.” Camilla kept her voice to a whisper. “Julian and the crew are in that farmhouse, across the channel.”
Brent scratched the side of his head. “We’ve got to get someone’s attention. Get them to come.” He looked past the houses, toward the mainland. “I mean, Highway 1 is right there, on the other side of the headlands. It’s less than a mile away.”
“That’s why I wanted us to come out here,” Juan said. “I have a couple ideas, but I don’t want to give anyone a chance to interfere. I’ll be right back.”
A chance to interfere? Camilla watched Juan hurdle the seal barricade, heading toward the blockhouse he now shared with Jordan. What did he mean by “interfere”?
In a minute, Juan was back, carrying what looked like a black hard-shell attaché case.
“The EPIRB I found during the scavenger hunt.” He patted the case. “They wanted us isolated, even jammed our cell phones. But Julian made a mistake, giving us this beacon. It’ll broadcast a marine distress satellite signal to the Coast Guard, with our GPS location. We turn it on, and they’ll be on their way in minutes.”
“How do you know it actually works?” Camilla asked.
Juan gave her a grim smile. “I’ve been turning it on four times a day to make sure, checking the signal, running the self-check diagnostics. It was factory sealed. They didn’t tamper with it.”
“What are we waiting for, then?” JT said. He had rejoined the group. “Fire it up.”
Juan nodded. He knelt and set the case down, unsnapped the catches, and raised the lid. Then he froze. He looked up at them, a strange expression on his face.
Camilla’s gut tensed. What now?