New Year Island

by Paul Draker

  JT was silent, breathing heavily.

  She poked him in the chest. “Juan wouldn’t have gotten very far with this tank. If he had actually tried to use it, he would have passed out underwater. Drowned.”

  “That’s messed up.”

  “Somebody planted this tank on the island for Juan to find. Now, because of it, he’s hurt and Jordan is dead.” She held his eye. “Please come back with me, JT. Juan’s not the one. We need your help, or we’re all going to die.”

  “Who do you think it is?” he asked.

  “Mason or Brent. It’s got to be.”

  “I’m not so sure what a rigged scuba tank proves. Person who did all this is one tricky motherfucker.”

  “None of us are going to last long on our own.”

  JT shook his head. “I survived five days alone in enemy territory, hunted through the Korengal like an animal, in hundred-and-thirty-degree heat, with a busted arm swollen up like a sausage. This is nothing compared to that. I’ll take my chances.”

  CHAPTER 167

  The sun was setting. Its rays painted the seals with a mellow gold light as they jostled each other on the rocks around Juan. A chilly breeze made him squint.

  He stood in front of the pyramid of rocks he had piled over Jordan. The red team’s flag waved above, planted at the head of her grave.

  He placed a hand on the cairn and silently bowed his head.

  Squeezing his eyes shut, he remembered a long-ago conversation with his father. Juan was in his late teens. They were on the veranda of the summer villa in Cartagena, which overlooked the water. Juan was eagerly awaiting his own departure for Malpelo Island in the morning. He planned to dive with Malpelo’s hammerhead sharks.

  Usually, he felt that the less he knew about family business the better. But this particular question had nagged at him for weeks.

  “Discúlpame, papá,” he said. “What Gaviria says, that we killed his niece…”

  “It is of no consequence.” Roberto Martín Antonio y Gabriel lit a cigar and picked up a coca leaf that lay beside the crystal ashtray. A courier had brought the leaf earlier. White fungus coated its underside.

  “It is like this.” Roberto jabbed a finger of his cigar hand at the white fuzz on the leaf. “Fusarium oxysporum. The norteamericano DEA plans to spray our fields with this, César. Our presidente—Pastrana, that weak woman—is colluding with them. This fungus rots the leaf from the inside out, leaving the plant vulnerable to insects and other diseases.”

  “Perdóname, papá.” Juan slouched in his chair and looked out over the water, wishing he hadn’t said anything, wishing he were already on the boat, miles away from here. “I don’t understand.”

  “Sentimentality is like this fungus. If you let it rule your actions, it will rot you from inside. Your enemies will smell your weakness and take everything from you.”

  Juan’s mouth tightened. “But surely, if we are seen to target women and the innocent, then how can we ensure that mamá and Constancia…”

  Roberto grabbed Juan’s wrist. “This is my fault. When I was your age I was poor, living on the street, fighting to make a name. I built this…” He waved the cigar at the walls around them. “…all of this, from nothing. But you, César, you have always been given everything. I have raised a spoiled playboy who talks to me about the ‘innocent.’”

  Roberto leaned toward him, and Juan looked down, wishing he had never spoken.

  “Tell me, who among us is innocent? Is this something you have learned from those chocha sisters of San Bartolomé I pay to teach you?” Roberto spat on the tile floor of the veranda and looked away.

  “All these fine, fancy manners and intellectual mierda, and you haven’t learned a thing about how to be a man.”

  “Papá, if something were to happen to mamá or Constancia—”

  “Then we would exact vengeance—a terrible vengeance. But we cannot allow fear to make us weak.”

  “Keyser Söse…” Juan muttered it under his breath.

  “Listen to me, César, instead of mocking the father who loves you. Listen well. The nonstop holiday you live—this endless vacation—will end one day, I promise you. You will be the head of this family after I am gone. We must never, NEVER allow sentimentality to prevent us from doing what we must to survive. I will not have a weak son.”

  Standing in front of Jordan’s cairn, head still bowed, Juan fought to control his emotions. Sharp pain pierced his chest. He was truly his father’s son: he had destroyed everyone he loved.

  He lifted the broken megalodon tooth—the pendant his brother Álvaro had given him—from around his neck and laid it on the mounded rocks of Jordan’s grave. She had never learned to hold a part of herself back. Her ability to manipulate others had always protected her. Confident in her own dominance, she had approached her world with a childlike innocence. She had opened her heart to him, and he had killed her for it. Better that, instead, he had never been born.

  The back of Juan’s neck prickled in warning. He spun around and dropped into a crouch, raising his hands.

  Veronica had already managed to get quite close. She hunched ten yards away. Seeing her quarry had spotted her, she straightened up and stepped closer. Juan matched her pace with a backward step toward the water.

  “Where’s Natalie?” she asked. Her large, pale eyes glowed luminous orange in the dying light of sunset. “I expected to find her with you.”

  Juan’s pulse quickened, sending a stabbing throb through his side. “How long has she been gone?”

  “I told her it’s not safe around here.” Veronica’s eyes gleamed like a predator’s as she moved toward him, but her voice held sad resignation. “She wouldn’t listen to me. She’s an adult, Juan. I can’t make her do anything.”

  Juan stepped backward, into the water. “Julian is dead. One of us set this all up.”

  “I figured as much,” she said.

  “Who do you think did this?”

  She stopped for a moment and tilted her head to the side, regarding him with her icy cobra’s gaze.

  “I don’t know. Maybe Mason. He was a banker, and money clearly isn’t an issue for whoever put this circus together.”

  “What about JT?”

  She snorted. “I can’t see it. He’s a big, frightened kid, underneath all that tough-guy posturing. He’s hiding, afraid of his own shadow right now, Juan…”

  She licked her teeth. “…scared shitless.”

  Veronica’s disturbing gaze crawled over his face. Her breathing sped up. “But we both know there’s someone else here with that kind of money; I’m looking at him right now.”

  Her pupils flared visibly.

  “Did you take Natalie? Maybe the first time, you brought her back just to fuck with us.”

  Waist-deep in the water now, Juan shook his head. “I don’t have that money anymore. I didn’t want it; it was filth. I took only what I needed to escape, and when I came to California I got rid of that, too. Donated it to drug rehab programs.”

  “Poor Natalie.” Veronica stood at the waterline, watching him intently. “She was so infatuated with you, Juan. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t listen. Tried to tell her what you were really like.”

  Juan winced. “Come any closer and I’ll drown you.”

  Veronica stopped advancing.

  “You know what’s weird?” she said. “Travis’s body is gone.”

  “Could he have still been alive?”

  Her small, throaty laugh chilled him. “No chance. You didn’t see him, did you? I broke his hyoid bone, Juan. I crushed his trachea. He was dead before he hit the floor; he just hadn’t realized it yet. And then I sent the scalpel through his carotid artery.”

  She shook her head. “No, somebody took him, which is kind of creepy if you ask me. But it’s not really all that important.”

  The sunset reflected in her luminous irises, its glow now fading to red. Her tongue flicked her upper teeth.

  “Sooner or later, I’ll find o
ut which one of you took Natalie, Juan…”

  Veronica’s grin was terrifying.

  “…or maybe I never will. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter. I can still make sure that person doesn’t leave this island alive.”

  With a last lingering look, she turned away.

  Standing in the waist-deep water, Juan watched her retreat.

  Day 9

  Saturday: December 29, 2012

  CHAPTER 168

  Camilla squatted beside Dmitry on the beach, looking at the four logs left over from the seal barricade. Dmitry had pushed them into an eight-foot-by-three-foot rectangle. He was shirtless, his broad back running sweat.

  “A raft,” she said.

  He swiped a forearm across his forehead and nodded.

  “Da. But this is no good. We need more logs. Need to take them from barricade, but that crazy woman says she kill me if I try.”

  She inspected the raft. It looked flimsy. It needed more logs, or it wouldn’t support even one person’s weight without rolling.

  “So how will you finish it?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” He raised his eyebrows and grinned crookedly at her. “Maybe tomorrow something changes; maybe not. This…” He waved a hand at the raft. “It is something to do, instead of sitting and waiting for somebody to kill me.”

  Camilla smiled.

  “We can use the chains to tie it together,” she said. “I’ll go get them.”

  She pushed her hair behind her ear.

  “Let me help.”

  Day 10

  Sunday: December 30, 2012

  CHAPTER 169

  Morning. Mason was fairly sure it was December thirtieth. The days were blurring by. The island’s remaining inhabitants had retreated to their separate corners and were all doing the same thing, it seemed: nothing much. Resting, operating at reduced levels of physical activity to conserve their energy. He grinned, thinking about it. It was probably instinctive behavior.

  For survivor types, anyway.

  Mason himself spent long hours each day just sitting or lying on the beach in the meager shade provided by the bluffs. He stared at the mainland, beckoning from across the wave-churned channel, so tantalizingly close. Watching the far shore each day, his normally overactive mind blank, the hours would pass in what seemed to be minutes. The clouds would crawl silently across the sky and the teeming colonies of seals and hopping birds would churn on the beaches around him, until the shadows lengthened and the air grew cold. Even in his low-energy meditative state, Mason’s eyes were always alert for signs of human activity across the channel. But only black elephant seals moved on the distant beaches.

  He found it hard to believe they had been on the island for only ten days. It seemed much longer, civilized life a fading, distant memory. Now, limping out of the station building to greet the morning, he raised his face to the sun. Despite the pain in his knee and not being able to sleep for more than an hour at a time, he felt refreshed. His original plan had been to stay awake all night again. But in the end he figured it wasn’t worth it. With his knee in the shape it was in, his odds of surviving another confrontation were not great. If anyone was going to come for him in the night, at least he would be better rested when they did.

  Mason had slept with the bear spray hugged to his chest, though. A calculated risk was one thing; trusting oneself fully to the whims of fate was another.

  Something near his feet caught his eye, and he grinned in surprise. A plastic jug of water sat in front of his door. It was intact and appeared to be full. He was very thirsty. He lowered himself, carefully sliding his left leg along the ground to avoid bending the damaged knee, and unscrewed the cap.

  Raising the jug, he drank. The water tasted clean, refreshing. He screwed the cap back on and stood with awkward movements. Carrying the jug, he limped up the scattered boardwalk, passing the broken catchment basin and the cistern where Julian’s body lay.

  He reached the island’s high point, beside the wreckage of the fallen lighthouse tower. Leaning against the metal framework to take the weight off his leg, he scanned the island around him. To the north, in the barren rockiness of orange territory, nothing moved. Down on the beach—black territory—Dmitry dragged a log across the sand, toward a makeshift raft. Mason grinned, shaking his head.

  He looked south, toward red territory, and his grin faded. Raising a hand to his forehead, he shaded his eyes.

  The barricade was down. A section had fallen, or the seals had breached it, sometime during the night. Seals and sea lions humped across the open ground and lounged around the two houses. More poured through the gap in the barricade, scattering the fallen logs.

  The houses themselves—the Victorian and the Greek Revival—both looked abandoned. Loose plastic sheeting flapped from the windows, dancing in the breeze. A section of plastic that had torn completely free blew across the flat ground, sending the seabirds in its path flapping into the air. The wayward plastic came to rest against the chicken coop, held there by the wind. Watching it slip free and blow away, Mason felt an uncharacteristic melancholy. Humanity’s tenuous foothold in this place would never be more than temporary. They did not belong here.

  Nature had once again reclaimed its own. It was erasing all traces of them.

  Near the chicken coop and the steps that led down to the beach, a small figure stood on the wooden walkway. Squinting, he tried to make out who it was, and finally recognized Camilla. Curly brown hair billowing in the swift breeze, she stood very still with her arms crossed, watching the houses.

  She turned her face toward him. In the distance, he couldn’t see her expression. Her body language was guarded, distrustful.

  He liked Camilla. He was amused to see that she had her purse slung over her shoulder and tucked under her arm, as if she were waiting for a cab on a busy Manhattan street. He waved to her. After a moment, she waved back. But slowly… tentatively.

  “Santa came late this year,” he shouted. He held up the jug of water, displaying it. “Did he leave you anything?”

  “Yes. I found some water, too,” she yelled back. “I was afraid to try it at first, but I couldn’t resist.”

  He thought about the look he had seen pass between Lauren and Juan when they hauled the water back to shore from the boulder. The way she had counted the jugs, frowning.

  “I’m pretty sure our Santa wears black,” he shouted.

  She pointed at the abandoned houses. “I’m worried about Natalie and Veronica.”

  Shouting back and forth was getting old. Mason limped down the slope toward her.

  “I don’t think you need to worry about Veronica,” he said. “She’s fine. I ran into her yesterday.”

  He looked down at his knee, swollen to the size of a grapefruit, and stopped to rest his leg. “Well, to be more accurate, I tried to run away from her yesterday. She looked like she was in great health when she broke my knee.”

  “Oh god.” Camilla visibly cringed. “Why did she do that?”

  “Someone took Natalie again.”

  “No!”

  “Veronica’s psychotic, and you’ve seen what she’s capable of. I think she’s decompensating—she’s definitely a danger to all of us now. You shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  He started toward Camilla again, but she backed away toward the beach steps. He was surprised to find that her distrust made him feel hollow inside. Empty.

  “You should let Brent take a look at your knee,” she shouted.

  “I don’t think my HMO considers him an in-network provider anymore.”

  “Mason!” But she kept her distance.

  “Well, actually, I did ask him, but he ignored me. The good doc was a little busy shooting up at the time. I did snag some painkillers out of the first-aid kit, but only the ones he didn’t want.”

  He laughed. “Like a kid with his Halloween candy—he let me take the apples and raisins but kept all the chocolate.”

  Grinning, he looked at her purse agai
n, and realized what she probably had in there.

  He gave her a cheery wave, and limped back up the hill.

  Camilla was full of surprises.

  CHAPTER 170

  Dmitry peered through the doorway of the blockhouse. Juan stood with both hands flat on the table, frowning down at the map again.

  “Don’t you get tired of staring at map?” Dmitry stepped inside to join him.

  Most of the pen marks Juan had made on the map earlier, along the shoreline and bluffs, were now crossed out with thick X marks. Dmitry pointed at one.

  “This is cave where you found generators, da?”

  Juan nodded. “Other than the generators and the fuel, it was empty. The power cables from the houses were hidden under the dirt, running down over the bluff edge and into the cave entrance.”

  “These other places—you think maybe you will find another cave?”

  Juan indicated one of the pen marks. “This is the one you told me about, filled with concrete when they built the station.” His eyes narrowed. “Over the last couple days, I’ve checked ‘em all. I’m missing something.”

  “What are you trying to find in cave?”

  “A communications uplink. Or at least the jammer preventing our phones from working. Does your phone still have a charge?”

  “Da. I am keeping it off.” Dmitry laid a hand on Juan’s shoulder. “Thank you for water, my friend.”

  “The Coast Guard built the lighthouse and the two mansions in the late eighteen hundreds. You don’t need pumps and boilers to run a lighthouse.” Juan tapped the station buildings on the map. “So what were these?”

  Dmitry had no idea.

  “The big factory building—what was it for?” Pointing at the map, Juan covered his mouth with his other hand and coughed, turning away. But Dmitry didn’t miss the way he wiped his palm on his thigh, leaving behind a smear of red.

  A weight settled over Dmitry’s shoulders. “I don’t know. Is not important now. We are building a raft, to get you to hospital—”