by Paul Draker
Mason, JT, and Dmitry joined them, looking over her shoulder in a tight semicircle.
Kneeling, she tapped the report that lay open before her. “The lighthouse itself wasn’t built until 1890, but the signal station was already operating twenty years before that. The building we’re in—all this machinery—it’s been here since 1872.”
She turned to Dmitry and put her finger on a black and white picture.
“Your science station was built inside of this.”
The caption beneath the picture read “Fog Signal Building.”
She pointed at the machinery all around them. “The original fog signal was a massive steam-powered whistle. This room was its engine room, generating the steam and sending it up to the whistle through that buried pipe outside.”
She couldn’t get the grin off her face.
“The signal was loud,” she said. “Loud enough to warn ships away in the heavy coastal fog. Loud enough to be heard miles out to sea.”
Juan knelt at her side, reading the captions, his face alongside hers. He tapped another picture. “The whistle itself must be buried in the pile of rubble where the steam pipe ends, at the top of the hill—”
“Next to the broken lighthouse tower.” She turned her head, meeting his eyes, thrilled to see that he shared her excitement.
“We get that signal going again,” she said, “and it’ll be heard by every ear up and down the coast, from Davenport to Pescadero.”
CHAPTER 183
Silent formations of pelicans lumbered through the sky above as Camilla and Mason shifted rocks, digging through the rubble pile.
In the distance, down near the cistern’s spillway, JT’s muscles flexed as he heaved the heavy high-pressure washer into place on a flat slab of broken concrete. Dmitry, his head still wrapped in a bandage, held the hose. The seals gave them a wide berth, leaving their work area clear.
Juan squatted next to them, looking into the ten-foot segment of steam pipe they had unearthed. From her angle, Camilla could see a ragged circle of light through the thirty-inch-wide pipe, but its edges were uneven—filthy inside after a century of disuse.
The roar of the power washer’s diesel engine filled the air. Juan stood and nodded to Dmitry, who directed a blast of high-pressure water through the pipe. A stream of mud, bird and wasp nests, and other debris washed out the far end. After a few minutes, he turned off the nozzle. The circle of light was round and smooth now.
Juan squatted and looked down the length of the pipe again. Then he gave JT the okay sign.
JT placed his hands on the outside of the pipe section and heaved, rolling it back into its trench.
Juan stood, looking down at it to make sure it was perfectly aligned. Like a construction foreman, Camilla thought—a construction foreman in a black wet suit. Her eyes followed the path of the steam pipe, tracing the remaining sections that bulged like vertebrae from the spine of the hill, climbing to where they disappeared under the pile of rubble that she and Mason were slowly disassembling. It was so good to see everyone working together, trusting one another again. They would rescue themselves from this nightmare. Together.
They were a team again.
Mason used one hand to balance himself, holding his bad leg away from the pile. He looked awkward but energized.
“Even if we find the whistle, how do you intend to get the pumps and boilers started?” he asked her. “They’re a hundred and forty years old. They must be rusted solid.”
“A girl’s gotta have some secrets,” she said.
“Look at that grin—jeez!” Mason laughed. “And I see how you just can’t keep your hands off our captain.”
She slapped his chest.
He smiled at her. “Can’t say I blame you. He’s not a bad guy for a drug lord.”
“Former drug lord.”
“Don’t get your hopes up,” he said. “He’s too torn up over Jordan.”
“I liked her,” she said. “I know that doesn’t matter now. But I did.”
“So did I,” Mason said. “There was a lot going on under her little-miss-prom-queen act. She was unique.”
Camilla glanced toward the bottom of the hill, where Juan stood with a palm pressed against his side, watching JT and Dmitry dig up the next section of pipe in front of him.
“Juan was probably a first for Jordan,” Mason said. “The first time a guy actually tried to leave her.”
“I don’t want to talk about that. What happened is so awful and so sad—for both of them. Let’s talk about Brent instead.” She looked down at the factory building, where they had left Brent chained to the wheel. “Why did he bring us all here?”
“I’m still working on that one myself.” Mason followed her gaze. “He won’t say. He’s just telling random lies now, messing with us. But there are really only three classic motives for murder: love, money, and revenge. I suppose the same motives must apply to mass murderers, too.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the particularly loving type. His family wanted a restraining order so they would never have to see him again. Money, though—could there be some truth to what Julian said about the video?”
“Well, Brent definitely was—or still is—recording all this,” he said. “We’ve seen some playback. But profiting from illegal pay-per-view seems farfetched as a motive.”
“And I can’t see revenge, either.” Her throat tightened. “What could he possibly imagine we did to him? We didn’t even know him, Mason. I certainly didn’t give him cancer or turn him into a drug addict.”
“It doesn’t have to be us personally. Maybe we just represent something to him. A type of person he hates and wants revenge on. Like the way some psychos target attractive women like yourself, for instance.”
“Thanks… I guess.”
She looked back at the factory building. It seemed dark and menacing even in the light of day. “But survivors? That’s crazy. Why would a survivor hate other survivors? Does he hate himself, too?”
“Hey, look.” Mason moved a rock and tugged at the corner of something rusty and metallic that poked from beneath. “Jackpot! I think we just found the whistle. Call the others.”
CHAPTER 184
“What’s wrong with Brent?” Camilla asked.
“You got a while?” Mason laughed. “Where do I even start?”
“No, seriously—look at him.” She pointed.
The five of them had gathered once again in the machinery room of the fog signal building. Fifty feet away down one of the rows of machinery, Juan, JT, and Dmitry had taken a panel apart. They poked at the valves and gears inside, talking, unaware of Brent’s plight. His head hung on his chest, jerking every few seconds. His entire body shuddered with violent trembling.
“Ah, the old Münchausen is faking it,” Mason said. “Travis could have told you. It’s the oldest prison trick in the book.”
“No, I think he’s going into convulsions,” she said. “Everybody, get over here!”
JT looked at Brent with a disgusted grimace. “Who cares? Let him die.”
“We don’t want to be like him,” she said. “Besides, he shouldn’t escape punishment for what he did here.”
Juan wandered over, followed by the others. He searched the pockets of Brent’s wet suit.
“Phone.” He held up a large touch-screen mobile phone in a Ziploc bag, then crouched and slid it across the floor to Mason. “Check it out.”
To Camilla’s relief, a few seconds later Juan unsnapped a small medical kit he had found in Brent’s chest pocket. Taking out a needle, he uncapped it and poked it into an ampoule. “Fentanyl,” he said. “How much do we give him?”
“He told us something like nine thousand milligrams,” she said. “Remember? But he could have been lying.”
“If he lied, then he just killed himself.” Juan drew the liquid into the syringe.
With a jolt, she realized her error. “No, wait! That was the other stuff. The pills. The modafinil. I have no idea on the fentanyl.�
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Juan looked at JT and raised an eyebrow.
“Give him twenty milligrams,” JT said.
Camilla’s eyebrows rose. “How do you know?”
“Our squad medic used to carry fentanyl in the field. We cross-trained.”
Juan stuck the needle into a vein on Brent’s wrist, which was held steady by the chains. He depressed the plunger.
“Something else we missed.” Mason looked up from Brent’s phone. “Battery levels. After ten days, he’s got a full battery. He’s been recharging somewhere.”
“No cellular reception, though…” Mason manipulated the phone for a few moments, then tensed with excitement. “He’s got a Wi-Fi signal here. There’s a hidden wireless network.”
A moment later, he lowered the phone, looking disappointed. “The screen’s locked,” he said. “We need an eight-character code to get in. Any ideas?”
Juan shrugged. “Año Nuevo.”
“Survivor,” Camilla said.
JT grunted. “Shit-head.”
Mason punched keys without apparent success. “I’ll try a few now.”
Brent’s condition didn’t improve over the next several minutes. The muscles and tendons in his neck and arms jumped like downed power lines.
Juan stuck the syringe into the ampoule again. “He did say he has a very high tolerance.”
“Give him another twenty,” JT said.
“Let’s give him two hundred and see what happens.”
The larger dose of fentanyl seemed to help. After a few minutes, Brent’s tremors lessened considerably. He stirred, rolled an eye toward Juan, and grunted. “Modafinil.”
Juan fed him some pills from the medical kit. Brent chewed them and mumbled for more. He couldn’t raise his head. Fragments of pills littered the front of his wet suit and fell to the floor, the white crumbs sprinkling the patches of dried blood where Mason had stabbed his shoulder.
Eventually, he had recovered enough to raise his head. He looked steadily at Juan. “I suppose I should thank you.”
Juan shrugged. “Thank Camilla. She insisted.” He walked away to lean with his back against the wall. “The rest of us were okay with letting you die.”
Brent turned his head toward her. His pupils were pinpoints again, surrounded by a jittering expanse of blue. “Dear, dear Camilla.”
She was horrified to see genuine affection in Brent’s eyes.
“You were such an adorable kid,” he said. “You know, I probably saved your leg.”
She felt the blood drain from her face.
“What she’d been through,” Brent said, “it broke your heart. Everyone on the hospital staff wanted to adopt her.”
Camilla closed her eyes. “Stop…” She could manage only a whisper.
“But then the rumors started. The EMTs, the fire crew—a kid named Garcia told me what they really found when they went in. Nobody wanted to believe such a thing about a little girl who looked like an angel, but it wasn’t a story you could ignore.”
Her mouth moved, but she couldn’t make a sound. “I can’t remember,” she finally whispered. “I don’t remember.”
“But I do,” Brent said. “I could never forget what Garcia told me. It was 1989, four days after the earthquake, when they brought you in. You were my very first survivor, Camilla. You opened my eyes.”
The skin on her arms tightened into goose bumps. What she remembered couldn’t possibly be true. She had been a child. Traumatized. She remembered it wrong.
Brent addressed the others. “When the earthquake collapsed the Cypress Freeway’s upper deck, her family’s car was under the worst section. The freeway came down right on top of it, crushing the car like a pancake. Trapping Camilla inside with her family. Breaking her legs.”
The doctor’s deep, merciless voice seemed to come from far away.
“She still had a little room to move about in the car. She was small, you see. But her parents weren’t.”
She shook her head violently, trying to shake loose from the paralysis that gripped her. A trapped-animal noise rose in her chest, fighting to break free.
“That’s enough.” Somebody else’s voice. Juan.
Brent chuckled. “Can you imagine how terrifying that would be? For a child who had known nothing but love and security before—an only child whose affectionate mother and father had built their whole lives around her? Darkness and smoke and screaming, blood everywhere? Her dead parents crushed, immobile, alongside her? She had to get out.”
“Stop right now.” Juan’s voice was louder.
Camilla’s hands shook. She didn’t want Juan to hear. She didn’t want anyone to hear. To know what she had done. The floor blurred in front of her eyes.
Brent didn’t stop.
“In extremis, some survivors are capable of nearly superhuman physical feats. There were walls of steel and concrete blocking her on all sides. When the rescue team found the car, the steel door frame was twisted like cheap cardboard. The side panels—sheet metal—were peeled and torn…”
She shook her head and shrieked, hurting her own ears.
“…but she still couldn’t wriggle out. Something was in her way. Luckily, it was much softer than metal…”
“No…” Her moan was barely audible.
“…easier to tunnel a path through,” Brent said. “I still find it hard to believe a child was able to do that with her bare hands, though. Can you imagine the kind of will to survive that would require?”
She heard fast footsteps crossing the floor, headed toward Brent. Soft, rubbery steps. Juan.
“They called her the ‘Little Angel of Death.’” Brent’s voice sped up, getting the words out before Juan could reach him. “You see, Camilla managed to escape that car on her own, several days before they found her crawling around under the rubble. The mess she made getting herself out of that car—what she did to her own dead parents—it would have followed her all her life. They were eviscerated. She quite literally tore them to pieces.
“The recovery crew pitied her, so they went back in. They disguised the damage. They covered it up, for her sake…”
Camilla stumbled toward the doorway on rubbery legs. She couldn’t see properly. She heard someone say, “Not. One. More. Word.”
In passing, she caught a glimpse of Juan pressing the Glock against Brent’s forehead. But she couldn’t look at either of them—couldn’t look at anyone. She had to find somewhere to be alone, curl up, and go away for a while. She bumped into the door frame, sending sparks of pain shooting through her broken nose and radiating through her face. Realigning her body with the doorway, she made it through on the second try, leaving the others behind.
She never wanted any of them to see her again.
CHAPTER 185
Camilla stumbled out the door, and Mason watched her go. Camilla the chameleon. I thought I had you figured out, but I was wrong. An unfamiliar sensation ran through his body. To his surprise, it occurred to him that it was very likely fear.
Juan held the gun to Brent’s forehead, leaning into his face, as if daring him to speak. Mason waited, but nothing interesting happened. Then he looked back at the door Camilla had gone through.
JT frowned and said, “Someone ought to go see if she’s okay.”
Mason looked at Juan. You should go, pal. You’re the one she wants—needs—to hear it from.
Juan’s fingertip was on the trigger. Brent stared back at him with amused contempt. A muscle in Juan’s jaw twitched, but he kept his face impassive. His eyes never left Brent’s, inches away.
Mason waited a moment longer. I guess not, then.
“I’ll go,” he said, struggling to his feet.
He found her a few minutes later in the blockhouse—Juan’s blockhouse. She was slumped on Jordan’s cot with her back against the wall. Her curly brown hair hung in front of her face, hiding it from him, as she stared at her hands and fingers.
Mason stood in the doorway, unsure what to do or say. His own reaction su
rprised him again.
She didn’t look up.
“I need to be alone right now,” she said, her voice empty of emotion.
“I’ll be right outside if you need anything,” Mason said. He limped around the corner of the door frame, and slid down it to sit in the sunshine. Seals shuffled about, curious, and he watched them.
When her quiet, wavering voice floated out of the blockhouse long minutes later, he barely heard it.
“Brent’s wrong. I got out the back window.”
Then came a high-pitched keen.
“I was trying to save them. I was trying to get them out. But instead, they came apart.”
CHAPTER 186
“Is frozen solid with rust.”
Juan watched Dmitry bang on the housings of pump after pump, walking down the row of machinery.
“This one. This one. This one. All of them. Very bad news, my friend.”
Juan swayed on his feet. Fever sweat slicked his forehead, and breathing was getting harder, although he tried not to let the others see it. The itch in his side—his lung—was worse now, making it hard for him to focus.
“We could use a mechanic.” JT laughed. “Too bad we don’t have one anymore.”
Steadying himself against a pipe, Juan tried to keep the concern off his face. The pumps were 140 years old. What was it that Camilla had in mind? She was too smart not to have considered this.
“We need new pumps,” Dmitry said.
A small voice spoke from the doorway. “We have new pumps. Two of them, in fact.”
Juan looked up in surprise to see Camilla. Then he realized what she meant. “The power washers.”
Mason followed her into the room.
“We go get them now.” Dmitry’s face lit up with his crooked smile. He turned to Brent. “Durak. This means ‘stupid.’ You are very stupid to kill Heather and Jacob. Here in America you will go to jail, but in Russia they would not waste jail cell and food on you. Waste only a bullet. And these people here are good people, too, that you try to kill.”