Phoenix Island, page 26
Carl felt frozen. He’d come all this way, put it all on the line, and now everything was falling apart. He looked again at the stretch of open ground, the kill zone. There was just no way. Cheng would cut them in half.
“Carl, can you use that thing?” Octavia pointed to the rifle lying beside Henshaw, who remained unconscious.
Carl nodded and scooped the rifle off the ground. It hadn’t even occurred to him to pick it up—he’d never wanted to shoot anyone—but he had to use it now. After pushing the selector to full auto and racking the charge handle, he risked a quick lean, looked up, and saw the dark line of Cheng’s barrel jutting out from the tower railing. Carl leaned out just far enough to put the sights on the black line of her barrel and pulled the trigger.
The noise was incredible. The machine gun kicked his shoulder five times, ten, fifteen—it was impossible to tell—and a spike of bright flame jutted from its muzzle. Bullets whined off metal, and sparks exploded overhead.
“Run,” he told Octavia.
She staggered to the gate, and Carl, having no idea whether he’d hit the barrel of Cheng’s rifle, sent another spray of bullets into the air.
Do not lean out, his mind begged the Phoenix Forcer. I do not want to kill you.
As he looked back toward the road, Octavia disappeared into the darkness of the forest. Good. She’d made it. He ran backward out from under the tower and squeezed off several more rounds.
Back toward the barracks, the flat crack of a single gunshot cut the air.
Carl saw a drill sergeant, maybe seventy-five yards away and running straight at him, arm held out straight, pistol in hand.
The drill sergeant fired again, and a bullet thwapped off the tower.
Carl blasted the ground between them, and the drill sergeant hit the dirt.
Backing through the gate, Carl fired over the tower to discourage Cheng from approaching the railing. The air was an explosion of noise and blinding flame and gun smoke and the smell of cordite. He was halfway to the trees when the bolt locked to the rear and he knew the magazine was dry. He dropped the rifle and sprinted into the darkness.
Just as he hit the trees, gunfire exploded behind him, and bullets tore the ground to his left and slapped loudly into the trees, one hitting so close that bark flew off it, making him squint. He charged deeper into the forest. Gunfire chewed the trees behind him, not so close this time, and then stopped. Carl could see Octavia up ahead, weaving through the woods, looking like she might drop at any time.
He caught up to her and took her hand, and they shuffled along side by side. She was making some kind of moaning, gasping noise, but he couldn’t tell if she was winded or crying. A terrible thought occurred to him.
“Are you hit?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”
He squeezed her hand. “You did awesome back there.”
She said nothing, just stumbled on.
He pointed into the darkness. “There should be a trail up ahead. They’ll expect us to go the other way, toward the road. This’ll take us straight uphill. It’s pretty steep.”
“Steep? Carl, I’m sorry, but I can’t do it.” All at once, she stopped running. “I’m done.” She started to fall, but he caught her.
“I’ve got you,” he said. He dipped low and scooped her into his arms. “I’m sorry if this hurts. But they know now, and we have to go as fast as we can.”
And he started running.
She was very light. His arms felt strong, his legs fast. Even his eyes felt sharper, and he found he was able to navigate through the forest with just the dim morning light falling through openings in the trees.
It was time for Plan B.
Plan A—sneak in quietly and steal Octavia away without alerting anyone—never really had a chance. He supposed he had only deluded himself into thinking it might work because without that shred of dubious hope, he never would have had the nerve to attempt her rescue. And feeling her in his arms, he was oh so glad he had. If they were going to die now, at least they would die on their terms, free, fighting, together.
So Plan B it was. He would throw off pursuit by attempting the unexpected and carrying her straight over the ridge and down the other side, where he would help her hide at the shoreline. Then he would go for a boat. And if he got to it in time—Oh, please don’t let this be another delusional plan, he thought—he would swing around the island for her. It was their only chance.
He ran on.
The ground angled steeply upward. Far behind, he heard gunfire and shouting.
By now, Parker would be ranting and calling him a coward, and Stark would be burning with white-hot rage at Carl’s betrayal.
Now they would distribute weapons and pour into the forest.
The hunt was on.
CARL LAID OCTAVIA GENTLY ON the ground beside the fallen tree. His muscles throbbed with exertion, and he was soaked with sweat, but he’d done it . . . he’d carried her over the ridge and back down the other side. A mere fifty feet away, jungle gave way to a narrow strip of sandy beach, beyond which the sparkling blue ocean stretched away into beautiful infinity: a cruel joke. Its gentle susurration beckoned Carl, invited him in his exhaustion to lie down beside his friend. Relax, the tide told him. Sleep . . . forget . . .
Not a chance.
Octavia’s face was flushed with fever, but her gray eyes were hard as twin stones. “You have to go. They’ll be here any second. Listen.”
Hooting voices drew nearer. Were these the same hunters he’d lost going up the slope? Or another group?
“I’ll hide you here,” Carl said, “under this tree. I’ll go to the boat, and when I have it, I’ll loop around the island and pick you up.” He pointed to a long arm of rocks that stretched like a natural pier into the water. “That’s how I’ll find you.” He forced a smile that he hoped showed more optimism than he felt. At least his time with Stark had given him that ability.
“Okay, Carl,” Octavia said. “That’s good.” And there was something in her face and her voice, something calm and content yet sad and reserved that reminded him of the tone his mother would take when he was very small and she was sick with cancer, and the two of them would talk about the future, chatting idly about Christmases they both knew they’d never share. Its recurrence in Octavia’s voice saddened him deeply.
More hooting sounded in the woods.
Desperation flooded him. He covered her over with palm fronds, trying not to think of spiders. He gave her his remaining canteen, held her hands, and looked into her beautiful gray eyes, feeling a lump come into his throat. She was all he had left in the world.
“I’ll come back for you. Okay? I promise. I’ll get you off this island. All right?”
She nodded, looking very sleepy. “I know you will. Now go. They’re almost here.”
It sounded like they would break through the forest at any time. He heard someone calling his name.
Madness.
He ran a thumb across her cheek. There were no tears. “I’ll see you again. I promise.”
“I know.” Her smile was as forced as his. “Now go.”
He ran back into the woods at a sharp angle, flanking the hunters and heading once more toward the mountain. He had to let them know where he was, where he was going, had to draw them away from Octavia’s hiding spot.
Their cries were close.
He waited.
Seconds later, he saw the first of them coming through the trees. A shirtless boy—he was too distant to identify—carrying something . . . a walking stick or spear . . .
“Leave us alone!” Carl shouted in the boy’s direction. He paused just long enough to be sure the boy had seen him and then started running again.
Their cries multiplied and turned in his direction.
Scrambling once more up the steep grade, he could hear the excitement in their shouting as they chased. Good. Now that he was sure they were on his trail, he would really sprint. He could beat them all on the obstacle course before he’d even received the blood virus. Now he’d leave them behind like they were jogging in place.
And that’s just what he needed: space. His only chance—and Octavia’s only chance—was misdirection. He’d drawn them away from her; now he had to trick them again.
He would sprint all the way up the mountain to the ridge where he and Stark had trained. It was a risky move—he’d be far more visible out in the open than he would be moving through the forest—but it was the fastest way across the island, and he needed to reach the boats before Stark figured out exactly what he was up to.
Behind him followed a chorus of bloodthirsty howls. It sounded like he was being hunted by a pack of werewolves. And wasn’t that what they were, really? Two months ago, they’d been a bunch of hard-luck kids; but this place had turned them into beasts of another sort.
Up the mountainside he scrambled, using the trunks of small trees like ladder rungs to pull himself along. The uphill sprint with Octavia in his arms had taken its toll, but he scaled the mountainside as quickly as he could, burning lungs or no burning lungs, and he took solace in the fact that the others would be dropping ever farther behind.
When he came to a storm-twisted clearing in the trees, he paused, bending over and pretending to be far more tired than he was. He wanted them to see him, wanted them to keep pushing in his direction rather than looping back past Octavia. Sure enough, he’d paused only a few seconds when shouting rose up at him.
Then a rifle shot cracked through the air, and a bullet whined off a nearby rock. He sprawled onto the stony ground just as a spray of lead chewed the trees overhead. Scrambling uphill, he escaped the clearing and passed once more into the relative cover of the forest. More gunfire rattled from below, but Carl knew they had little chance of seeing him, let alone hitting him, now that he was in the trees again.
Gunfire meant Phoenix Forcers. They had been receiving the same treatments he’d been given. Some of them could run as quickly as he could, some probably faster. And they hadn’t passed sleepless nights, then sprinted up and down mountainsides carrying someone in their arms.
He couldn’t outrun them. Not indefinitely. Not them or their guns.
At last, the trees thinned, and he crested the steep slope and found himself at the lower edge of the long ridge of stone that ran like an exposed spine across the center of island. With the first twinges of exhaustion starting to pop like fireworks in his thigh muscles, he sprinted into the open. From this high vantage point, he heard what sounded like a thousand voices closing in.
The stony ridge was perhaps ten feet wide. To its left, the ground sheered away into open air, a window onto the lower canopy ten stories below. Its empty vastness made him feel wobbly.
He glanced to the right, looking for the trailhead of the steep path he and Stark had used, and—
“There he is!”
They rushed up the hill, looking like hunters out of the Stone Age, six shirtless boys carrying spears. For a second, he recognized none of them, partly because mud was smeared like war paint on their faces but more so because of the faces themselves, which were so twisted with savage bloodlust, they looked more like animals than the boys he’d once known.
“Aaiiaii!” someone—Fay, Carl thought—cried as he threw his spear.
It was so abrupt, their breaking from the woods, that Carl had frozen, and by the time he saw the spear coming at him, it almost skewered his face. Fortunately, his years of boxing saved him. Out of instinct, he jerked his head to the right, like he was dipping away from a fast jab, and the shaft of the weapon tickled past his ear.
It would’ve killed him.
There was no place to run. There were six of them, five with spears, the sixth—and yes, Carl saw, it was Fay, who’d always seemed kind of timid but now looked like a starving wolf running down its prey—drew a big knife from his belt. They were less than thirty feet away, charging fast. The ridge was an open, rocky path; whether he ran forward or backward, they would cut him off.
“You’re dead, Hollywood!” someone yelled.
Carl turned from them, and the world pulsed in and out of focus. The sheer cliff plunged away to the jagged boulders piled at its base. Beyond that was forest.
Something thumped into his shoulder. For a second, even as he registered the spear falling away into the void and the sensations of warmth and wetness and pain springing to the surface of his shoulder, he teetered on the edge of the cliff, filled with terror as he pin-wheeled his arms to keep from tumbling over the edge.
He caught his balance just in time to dodge another spear, which flashed past him, arched out over the cliff, and disappeared into the canopy far below.
“Hold your spears!” one of the kids said—it was Biscoe, Carl saw, and a memory flashed through his mind, Biscoe standing beside his bunk, laughing at Ross’s impersonation of Parker, tears running from his eyes—“Use them to stab!”
They were twenty feet away. He could never beat them all, not the way they were armed. . . .
No way out, no escape.
“Spears in front!” Biscoe commanded. “Knives move in from behind. Push him off the cliff.”
But Carl beat them to it.
He ran three steps and leapt into the void.
THEIR SCREAMS OF SURPRISE ripped away behind him as his body rushed toward the treetops, adrenaline slowing the moment, giving him time to think, absurdly enough, how like a movie all this was. How the desperate hero evaded certain death by throwing himself from some great height—a cliff or bridge or airplane. Only, in the movies, the heroes jumped into water. . . .
Not Carl.
He slapped into the leaves of the upper canopy first, slammed into something hard, and screamed when whatever it was, tree trunk or limb—he didn’t know up from down in this tumbling green moment—smashed his ribs like a giant fist. Falling again, he spun in the open air, his thoughts reduced to a string of exclamation points as he grabbed wildly at branches, everything around him a green blur veined in cracks of sunshine gleaming through the upper reaches. His hands raked past branch and bark but couldn’t find purchase. He felt a fingernail peel away, plummeted in a terrifying free fall, clipped his shin on something hard as steel, and grabbed a smaller branch, which bent with the force of his fall.
The branch burned his hand, but he held tight, even when his body jerked hard, and it felt like his shoulder might rip from its socket. Then the branch snapped away, and he was falling again. He managed to keep his feet under him and bent his knees as he slammed into the forest floor.
His legs took most of the impact. He tried to roll with it but hit his shoulder hard against the ground. He lay for a second, hurting. His ribs were almost certainly broken. One shoulder felt dislocated, while the other bled moderately, sliced by the spear. His hand burned, a red line ripped raw across the palm where he’d seized the branch. His shin throbbed, and his ankle pulsed with pain. Despite all this, a rush of joy filled him with pure elation—he’d nearly died, but he was alive, alive, alive!—and he struggled to his feet.
He’d done it. He’d jumped off a cliff, smashed through trees, and survived the drop to the jungle floor. He lifted his fists skyward and thanked God for this slice of amazing luck.
Above him, all was green shadow. He could hear the boys far up above hooting and laughing, no doubt thinking he’d killed himself.
Good, he thought. Let them think that.
He turned his back on the cliff and took a second to get his bearings. Far off to the left, Octavia waited. Straight ahead, through a wide span of heavy, unfamiliar forest, was the ocean. He needed to push in that direction but angle right. Eventually, he would come to the beach, and if his sense of direction were intact, he’d end up just outside Camp Phoenix Force. His only hope was that the Phoenix Forcers had abandoned camp for the duel and then gone off into the forest, looking for him.
He limped into the unfamiliar forest.
The going was slower than he would have liked. He and Stark had never run this corner of the island, and he kept running into unexpected delays: a natural fence of boulders at the base of the central peak, a deadfall of wind-damaged trees, a veritable wall of thorn bushes. And, just below a stream where he paused to drink water and rest his aching body, a murky swamp buzzing with mosquitoes and stinging flies.
At last he found a narrow trail furrowed into the ground. Wherever the rough path split, he headed left toward the camp, and hopefully the boats and freedom.
When he came to the hillside clearing and heard grunting, he remembered why he and Stark had never traveled this section of the jungle.
A groan escaped his lips as uphill, where the clearing ended in a span of gloomy forest, dark shapes moved.
More grunting. A whistle. A squeal.
A big boar charged out of the trees, white tusks flashing.
Carl ran in the opposite direction.
The clearing ended just as he hit his stride, and he found himself flying through the air as the ground broke away, not to a sheer cliff but to a sparsely wooded hillside. He hit the ground running, fell, rolled, and, against all odds, popped up running again. Birds squawked loudly into the air, as if feeling the pain that raged through his battered body. Leaves and branches slapped into him as he hurtled downhill, expecting at any second to feel the boar’s tusk slash into his legs.
At last the ground leveled out again, and he realized the trees were thinning, that a wall of bright sunshine burned just ahead.
Some distance behind him, an angry squeal cut the air, and Carl turned to see the big boar waddling back uphill, looking dangerous and proud at having defended its territory.
Carl slowed to jog and then to a limp. Everything hurt.
Uphill, the pigs squealed and huffed but stayed over the rise, out of sight. It seemed they’d given up the chase. Of course they had; that was natural, wasn’t it? They were animals. They were vicious, sure, but this wasn’t personal. Their aggression was merely territorial. They weren’t so savage as human animals who went out in packs to hunt and kill their own kind.
