New Year Island

by Paul Draker

  The bleak expression on Juan’s face made Camilla’s eyes sting.

  Brent’s eye twitched violently. “Are you noticing any side effects?” he asked. “The dosages you all took were moderate, and there are significant environmental stressors right now. How are you feeling? Any anxiety reactions or disorganized thoughts? Unusual sensations you can describe?”

  She realized he was talking about the pills—the modafinil he had given them to stay awake. Disquiet rippled through her stomach.

  “You had Julian present this all as fun and games,” she said. “But I noticed he used a lot of behavioral psychology terms: ‘zero-sum game,’ ‘double blind’… The contests were even based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Why?”

  Brent smiled at her like a proud parent. “I’d say Maslow’s pyramid made an ideal framework for our competition. Step by step, contest by contest, each of you has climbed the levels of his hierarchy. The top layer of Maslow’s pyramid? It’s self-actualization—realizing your true potential. Abraham Maslow said, ‘What a person can be, he or she must become.’ And all of you have. You have, indeed.”

  He raised his voice.

  “Take a good look at yourselves. Other than your one defining moment, each of you has gone through your life asleep. I’ve woken you up again. I’ve stripped you of the civilized camouflage you use to disguise your true nature.

  “And here on this island, we can see what you truly are—what it really means to be a survivor. Survival is not a gentle process, it’s a brutal one. Half the seals born here will fall prey to sharks before they reach the open sea. Others will be crushed by their own parents or pecked to death by hungry seabirds. But not the survivors. They are the ones doing the crushing and the pecking. That’s who you are. What you are. And anyone unlucky enough to get in your way ends up as collateral damage—chewed up, spit out. Dead.”

  “Why do you hate us so much?” she asked.

  “I don’t hate you, Camilla. In many ways, you’re like a daughter to me. I’ve followed your progress for twenty-three years, even as I watched my own son grow up. I do hate what you are, though: a survivor.”

  She refused to see herself the way he did: as a monster.

  “You’re a survivor, too,” she said.

  Brent shook his head. He looked old.

  “No, I’m not. I never was. I wanted to be, tried to be, but I’m not.”

  He raised his eyes to hers, his gaze steady.

  “I didn’t beat the cancer. I’m dying. I didn’t beat the drugs. I need them to stay functional right now. At these elevated dosages, the drugs are killing me faster than the cancer. But I did beat you—all of you. None of you will leave this island alive.”

  Staring at him, her heart in turmoil, she couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “You’ve got the lowest body mass here,” he said. “You took the same two-hundred-milligram dose of the experimental variant. Has it enhanced your ability to function under stress? Do you feel any negative side effects, such as a heightened fear reaction?”

  “I just feel sad, Brent. And sorry for you.” She turned away.

  He laughed. “The psychologists are ultimately misguided. The correct tool for studying the phenomenon of survival is medical science. Biology. We’ve learned a great deal about it since Maslow’s time. We now have a decent understanding of the physiological basis of survival, and to a large extent, it’s actually brain chemistry.”

  His voice deepened, and she could hear the dark strains of his obsession.

  “Your amygdala is programmed to react to threats and stressors by triggering the release of catecholamines. Epinephrine and norepinephrine make your blood vessels constrict. Cortisol accelerates your heart rate, your breathing, and your metabolic processes so you are ready for fight or flight. Your neuromuscular system executes preprogrammed survival reflexes automatically, far faster than conscious thought. With the right pharmaceutical compounds, we can now amplify all these functions to an amazing degree.

  “But chemically boosting these brain functions gives rise to a different set of problems. The chain reaction of powerful hormones and compounds blasting through your brain and body has undesirable side effects. It overwhelms the brain’s neocortex—the seat of analytical thinking. Tunnel vision sets in. Irrational impulses take over. The heightened perception and analytical capability that are so critical to survival are weakened.

  “The key is finding the right chemical balance. One that simultaneously accentuates both the primitive amygdala-driven limbic reactions and the higher neocortical functions. Then you would have the recipe for a true ‘survivor drug.’”

  At the sound of Juan’s rubber-padded footsteps, Camilla looked up.

  Juan crossed the floor with rapid strides to stop in front of Brent. Jamming the small medical kit into the chest pocket of Brent’s wetsuit, he turned away in dismissal.

  “Sorry to hear about your illness,” he said. “We’ll send flowers.”

  Standing with his back to Brent, Juan addressed them all.

  “Mason said Brent’s phone has an active Wi-Fi connection. That means there’s a wireless base station very close to us. I think it’s right underneath us, inside a second cave.”

  Mason started to get up. “I’ll go look for it.”

  “No.” Juan’s voice was hard. “I need you to stay here. I’m going.”

  He waved a finger in a circle. “The cameras on the island are all wireless. Alongside the base station, I expect to find computer equipment for video storage, and—if we’re lucky—a live communications uplink to the Internet. Otherwise, I’ll find the jammers keeping our own mobile phones from working, and disable them. Either way, we’re out of here.”

  “But we’ve been over every inch of this island,” Camilla said. “If there was another cave, we would have found it.”

  Juan picked up the black backpack sitting next to the wall—Brent’s scuba rebreather tank—and smiled humorlessly.

  “Not if the only entrance is underwater.”

  CHAPTER 191

  Camilla watched Juan strap the rebreather around his shoulders. He tried the air, breathing in and out carefully, then waiting, making sure there was nothing wrong with it. Then he walked toward the door, his long scuba fins bouncing against his shoulders. She felt both hopeful and frightened—he was in much worse shape than he was letting on, and she hoped he would be okay in the water.

  In the doorway, he stopped and looked over his shoulder at her.

  “Keep an eye on Dr. Moreau here,” he said, “but don’t let him drag you into conversation. That’s a no-win.”

  He looked at JT and Mason. “For any of us.”

  “No sweat, Captain,” JT said. A muscle in his shoulder flexed. “We’ll keep him on ice for you until you get back.”

  “Be careful,” Camilla said. “He’s been five steps ahead of us all the way.”

  Juan touched his forehead with two fingers, throwing them all a little salute.

  With a feeling of dread, she watched him disappear through the doorway. She fought back the urge to run after him, to stop him from going. But what if she never saw him again?

  “He’s running.” Brent closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wheel with a satisfied smile. “He’s leaving you all behind. It’s what he does. Looks like you finally got the captain you deserve, Corporal Washington.”

  Camilla’s stomach churned. Brent had just put into words the doubt that she couldn’t even admit to herself.

  “You’re wrong about Juan,” she said. “About JT, too.”

  “Am I?” Brent didn’t open his eyes, but his smile grew. “All your behavioral profiles were very clear. Especially JT’s. Ask Julian. Oh, that’s right, I’m sorry—I guess you can’t.”

  Mason laughed. “Poor Julian was just some actor you hired.”

  “Was he, now? Did you check his business card?”

  “Oh, shit,” JT stood up. “We never searched Julian’s body.”

 
Camilla tensed. “No. It’s another trick. Don’t listen to him.”

  Brent’s eyes stayed closed. “I never did find out Julian’s MOS.”

  “What’s an MOS?” she asked.

  JT’s brow furrowed. “Military operating specialty.” He knelt and tightened his shoelace.

  “He’s messing with you,” Mason said. “Julian wasn’t military.”

  “Don’t stereotype,” JT said. “Some of the higher-ranking scientists and doctors were REMF desk jockeys—they didn’t all look and dress like us grunts. Can’t hurt to check.”

  Without looking back, he strode out of the room.

  “Well played,” Mason said to Brent.

  Camilla was troubled.

  “I’m not so sure,” she said. “There’s one organization I can think of with a checkered history when it comes to dangerous and illegal human experimentation. An organization that would literally kill to get its hands on a drug like Brent was talking about earlier. The U.S. military.”

  Brent opened his eyes and looked at her. His smile was paternal, affectionate. “Before his discharge, JT’s MOS was oh-three-two-one—forward observer. He was very good at it. Julian promised him a full, honorable reinstatement to his previous rank if he served as official observer here.”

  CHAPTER 192

  Juan stood at the end of the empty dock, looking down into the black water. Already, he could feel his body’s rhythms adjusting, slowing in anticipation. Placing a hand over his mask and regulator mouthpiece to hold them in place, he clamped his other elbow against his wounded side. Then he stepped off the dock, and the cool water closed over his head. With a few quick bursts of air, he inflated the rebreather’s integrated BC just enough to reach neutral buoyancy.

  The fierce pain in his chest faded. He smiled in relief as the water’s gentle support lessened the relentless pressure of his own body weight on his injury. Hovering six feet beneath the surface, neither rising nor sinking, he kicked his way into the shadows beneath the dock.

  Something glinted ahead—the last section of the shiny chain that had destroyed the scientists’ boat. Juan traced it to its source: a massive steel eyebolt screwed through one of the dock’s support pilings.

  He moved to the next piling, fifteen feet closer to shore. Another heavy chain was attached to its base as well. The second chain led away from the dock, angling down the rocky slope toward deeper water.

  He remembered JT saying he had seen someone in scuba gear entering the water near the dock, at night, on multiple occasions. JT had assumed it was him. But it could only have been Brent, returning to a hidden base of operations. What had he been doing night after night?

  Juan’s eyes narrowed. He would know soon enough.

  With slow, graceful sweeps of his long free-diving fins, he swam alongside the second chain. The rippling quicksilver surface receded above him as he followed the chain down the slope.

  The guideline of steel links led him through a kelp forest. Cathedral rays of light beamed through the towering stalks, laddered with their scythe-shaped green and brown leaves and float bladders, swaying rhythmically in the gentle surge. A huge shoal of sardines hung in the water. The shimmering silver curtain of fish opened to let him through and closed behind him.

  Passing through the underwater glade, Juan took in the beauty all around him. Yellow and purple starfish clung to the rocks, and cottony white Metridium anemones sprouted like flowers from the dark surface. He felt the knot that sat like a clenched fist in his chest begin to loosen.

  The ocean was the only place he felt truly at peace. He wished he could have shown the underwater world he loved so much to Jordan… shared it with her… The thoughts grew too painful to pursue, so he shoved them aside.

  A bright orange Garibaldi damselfish hung suspended in the water between two kelp stems. It was a rarity this far north. Standing guard over its nest and eggs, mouth opening and closing, it watched him go by.

  He reached the edge of the kelp forest. The chain had taken him deeper. He scanned the blue water around him cautiously before moving out of the kelp. His pulse rose to a steady cadence. His mental radar was on full alert. Juan knew he was a mere visitor here.

  He thought of Lauren, who had not known whose territory she was crossing.

  A few yards beyond the edge of the kelp, the chain angled down into a narrow underwater ravine. He followed it, and the rocky walls closed in on both sides of him. Three meters over his head, the channel opened into blue water, but the passageway he swam through was only a meter and half wide—narrow enough to protect him from the massive predators patrolling above. Beneath Juan, the channel narrowed to a crack that dropped deep into the island’s rocky substratum. He thought of the geological fault lines Dmitry had drawn on the map. A long-ago earthquake had created this rent in the seafloor.

  Sea stars and plate-size anemones decorated the walls to each side with splashes of orange, purple, and green. Juan let the chain slide loosely through his glove as he swam. Picturing the map and trying to fix his position in relation to the island, he put himself almost directly in line with the fog signal building.

  He could sense a change in the environment: a complete absence of fish around him, a pregnant stillness.

  The light changed overhead, darkening his section of channel. Instinctively freezing like a sparrow crossed by the shadow of a hawk, he looked up.

  The broad, pale underbelly of a great white shark slid silently through the blue water above the ravine. Its meter-high tail swept back and forth, gradually disappearing from sight.

  Moments later, another great white crossed above the edges of the channel, some distance ahead. Juan could see its curving jaws, the protruding gums studded with razor-sharp triangular teeth.

  A third, nearly twenty feet long, passed almost directly overhead, so close that Juan could have stroked its belly with an outstretched arm. The shark’s gill slits pulsed with the rhythm of its motion. Its dark eye, big as an orange, fixed Juan with a cold stare. Then it, too, slid out of sight behind the lip of the channel.

  Juan’s heart sped up. He knew what drew these predators to him. He could see the wisps of red that rose from his wet suit where his blood was leaking slowly into the water. It would be an irresistible attractor, but there was no turning back now.

  The ravine that he swam through grew shallower ahead. It came to a gradual end on the rocky slope, opening out into blue water.

  CHAPTER 193

  JT placed a palm on the rim of the cistern’s dome and leaped down into the rubble-strewn interior. Four steps brought him to where Julian’s moldering body lay sprawled in the circle of light from the hole above.

  He knelt beside Julian, waving away the buzzing cloud of flies and holding his breath against the stench. Was it really possible that Julian had been a military scientist? He checked the corpse’s slime-soaked front pant pockets. Nothing. Rolling the body to the side, he frisked the hip pockets. Nothing.

  He pulled Julian to a seated position, holding him upright with one hand. Julian’s head lolled forward, drooling red-orange worms and spilling a cascade of wriggling white maggots onto his forearm. JT shook them off impatiently, with Julian’s cold teeth smiling against his other wrist. Then he reached inside the sodden silk coat. The pockets were empty, but he felt something lumpy against Julian’s squirming chest: a locket necklace beneath his shirt.

  He ripped Julian’s collar open, spreading his tie. Julian’s head lolled back—too far. The decomposing ligaments and tendons sloughed apart until Julian’s skull dangled between his shoulder blades like the hood of a sweatshirt.

  A morass of bristly, foot-long marine bloodworms churned inside Julian’s sunken chest like wet centipedes. The serrated sides of their segmented bodies slithering orange and green between his exposed ribs. Reaching into the wriggling quagmire, JT fished out the shiny locket that hung from a thin silver chain around Julian’s folded neck. A sharp sting pierced his wrist, and a fifteen-inch bloodworm sank its four-pronged j
aws deeper into his skin and coiled around his forearm. Ripping the worm loose with his other hand, he tossed it away.

  He snapped the locket chain with a jerk of his fist and flipped the elegant silver case open. Tensing, he stared at the picture of the attractive couple inside, seeing Jordan beaming up at him with her flawless smile. Her cheek was pressed against a grinning Julian’s.

  JT tightened his fist around the locket.

  Then he relaxed, shaking his head. Brent’s tricks were getting old. It was easy enough to stitch two images together with Photoshop software. Using his MacBook, JT himself could have faked this in five minutes.

  But what if they had found this on Julian four days ago, while Jordan was still alive—before they knew that the real culprit was Brent? Would they have believed her?

  He shook his head again and tossed the locket aside, not liking the answer to his own question.

  Hell, they would have killed her over this.

  From the corner of his eye, JT caught a flicker of furtive motion at the rim of the hole behind and above him.

  He spun toward the threat as someone dropped into the darkness of the cistern’s far side. The intruder landed lightly on hands and feet, like a predatory cat, then rose to a crouch, nearly invisible in the shadow of the rim.

  Straightening into a ready stance, JT raised his fists. He peered into the darkness, straining to see.

  Keeping out of the light, the silhouetted figure circled toward him along the wall of the cistern, staying low. Puffs of steam rose into the cold air: the intruder’s breaths, a steady panting.

  “Hello, JT,” Veronica said.

  CHAPTER 194

  “It’s illogical to hate survivors,” Camilla said. “Nobody lives forever.”

  She stared up into Brent’s forbidding, impassive face, needing to understand why they were here, why he had done this to them. She didn’t believe any of the reasons he had given them so far. She chose her words carefully.