Matt de la Peña - The Living

Shy glanced up as he ran. The sun was already dropping from the sky. He only had about an hour and a half before he had to get back to the hotel. He tried to pick up his speed.

The land leveled out and the path began to narrow. Shy kept running, ducking under tree limbs, leaping over puddles. The faster he ran, though, the more his mind flooded with questions. How had the disease gotten all the way out to the island? Was someone on the cruise ship sick? One of the hotel workers? And where were the two scientists going on that motorboat with the duffel bag? And who shot them?

Shy didn’t notice that the path came to an abrupt end until the last second. He tried to stop, but his momentum made him slide through the dirt. At the very edge of the cliff he grabbed a thick tree branch to keep himself from falling.

He looked down, his heart climbing into his throat as he watched the rocks he’d just kicked tumble fifty, sixty feet, into the ocean. He’d survived giant waves, a sinking cruise ship, circling sharks, only to almost fall off a cliff. He squatted down to catch his breath.

There was a large clearing to the right. A cement platform that looked like a helicopter launchpad. To the left he saw what had to be the flooded lab sticking up out of the ocean. A tall security fence wrapped all the way around it.

No sign of Shoeshine.

Shy doubled back to the Y in the path and was starting down the other route when he heard someone calling his name. He stopped and turned around. It was Bill, limping up out of the brush, using a stick as a cane. “Shy! I’ve been looking all over for you!”

“Me?” Shy answered. “Why?” He looked around to see if anyone else was there. Even after the nice things the guy had said about him during lunch, Shy still didn’t trust him.

“I wanted to thank you personally,” Bill said. He was wearing a generic baseball cap now and a green backpack. He looked kind of scratched-up from walking through the brush. “I meant what I said back at the restaurant. I wouldn’t be here if you and your friend hadn’t pulled me out from under that chandelier.”

“Anyone would’ve done it,” Shy said cautiously. He needed to shake this guy and continue looking for Shoeshine.

“But it wasn’t anyone. It was you.” Bill pulled off his cap, ran his fingers through his hair and put it back on. “What’s the matter, Shy? You seem upset. Everyone else back at the hotel is so excited to be going home.”

“That’s ’cause they haven’t been up to the penthouse,” Shy fired back. He was sick of all the secrecy. It was time for people to start being straight with each other. “There are people dying up there, man. And nobody’s telling us shit.”

“You’re right,” Bill said, balancing on his stick. He adjusted his cap again. “I don’t think they want to alarm anyone. We’ve been through enough already, haven’t we?”

“And what about LasoTech?” Shy continued. The questions were just flowing out of him now. “You work for them, right? What do you guys do?”

“We produce pharmaceuticals,” the man answered. “Well, I don’t personally. I’m only a member of the security team.”

Shy knew it. There had never been any hospital equipment. He wondered if Addie had straight-up lied to him, or if she really didn’t know. “And what do you know about a brown and blue duffel bag with vaccinations?” Shy found himself shouting now. He could feel the heat rising in his face as he pointed out toward the ocean. “And how about two scientists who got shot on a motorboat out there?”

Bill nodded at him for a few seconds; then he glanced at his watch. “Listen, there’s still a little over an hour before we need to be on the beach. Let me show you something, Shy. It won’t take long, I promise.”

Shy scoffed at the guy. “I’m not going anywhere with you,” he said. “All I’m saying is I know your company is shady as shit. And sooner or later, everyone’s gonna find out.” He turned and started back down the path, pissed off but scared now, too. Because maybe he’d said too much.

“It involves the loss of your grandmother!” Bill called after him.

Shy stopped in his tracks and spun around. “What are you talking about?”

“Your grandmother,” Bill said. “Or more specifically, the disease that killed her.”

Shy stared at the guy, breathing hard, trying to make himself think straight.

“I’m only telling you this because of what you did for me on the ship.” Bill waved with his stick for Shy to follow him. “Trust me, you’ll want to hear what I have to say.”

The man turned and started limping up the path.

Shy followed Bill up the hill, to a lookout point just off the path where he pointed to an even better angle of the submerged lab. “You see that building down there?”

Shy nodded. “I already know, it’s your company’s lab.”

“It was the lab,” Bill said. “Before the ocean surge destroyed it. Do you know what took place inside those walls?”

Shy shrugged. He’d come to hear about his grandma, not to listen to some long, drawn-out story.

“The most important drug research and development in the country,” Bill continued. “But it turns out that’s not all LasoTech developed. The man you saw jump off the ship—”

“David Williamson,” Shy said.

“Yes, Mr. Williamson. He left a letter in a cave that’s a few hundred feet away from the lab. We used the cave as a second dock for our boats. The scientists also used it as a storage facility. The day my lifeboat landed here, I learned that a scientist had discovered this letter. I then read the letter with my own eyes. It was long—seven typed pages—and it revealed some very disturbing information.”

Shy vaguely remembered the comb-over man mentioning a letter before he jumped. “So what does all this have to do with my grandma?”

“Everything,” Bill answered. “This letter explained exactly how Romero Disease originated. I believe Mr. Williamson had what people call a crisis of conscience. Kind of ironic that the information I was seeking this whole time was printed on lined pages, isn’t it?” The man limped a few steps toward a small boulder on his left. “God, this leg is killing me.”

Shy watched him sit down and take off his backpack, set it between his feet.

Bill looked up, said: “Mr. Williamson had been part of the company from the beginning. He developed many original medications that helped a lot of people and made the company a lot of money. But according to his letter, he wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to do something no scientist had ever done before. That’s when he and Mr. Miller came up with a novel idea. Instead of always reacting to the environment, they wanted to create the environment. So they worked backward.”

“I don’t get it,” Shy said.

“Instead of developing a drug to treat a disease, they set out to develop a disease that would need a drug. And that’s exactly what they did.”

When it hit Shy what the guy was saying, his whole body went numb. “They created Romero Disease in a fucking lab?”

“According to the letter we read,” the man said, nodding. “Trust me, we were all as blindsided by this information as you are.”

Shy could feel his anger rising as he stared at the man. “So how’d people get infected?”

“That’s where Mr. Miller came in—your friend’s father. According to the letter, Mr. Miller opened a free clinic in Mexico—under a different name, of course. For two years they treated poor border communities for everything from the common cold to breast cancer. But they also secretly infected the first few patients with their deadly disease.”