Matt de la Peña - The Living

“I guess if they’re scientists,” Shy said, switching the duffel from one shoulder to the other. He’d pulled it out of the tree on their way to see the body they were now standing over. He kept looking down at the man, Bill, remembering him pointing the barrel right in his face. It made Shy feel like a ghost. Like he shouldn’t actually be standing here, breathing.

“He had the gun right against my head,” Shy said, trying to make sense of what had happened. “I thought it was over.”

“And that’s when Shoeshine blasted him?” Carmen said.

“He saved my life,” Shy told her. “Twice in one day.”

“This is really freaking me out,” Carmen said. “We have no idea what we’re going back to.”

All three of them stood there, looking at each other and at the body. “So no one knows a vaccine even exists?” Marcus asked.

“I don’t think so,” Shy said. “He made it sound like they wanted to back away from the whole thing.”

“You know what they basically did, right?” Carmen kicked the dead body right in the ribs. “They sacrificed poor people to scare money out of rich people. They sacrificed my fucking dad.”

“Beyond shady,” Marcus said. “That’s, like, some kind of genocide or something.”

“Soon as we get back,” Carmen said, “we’re telling everyone. Cops, FBI, CIA, whoever we can find.”

Shy just kept staring at the man’s head. He was so angry he was shaking and his teeth were chattering. And then a thought occurred to him. The envelope in the duffle. He unzipped the bag and reached past the pack of syringes and opened the beat-up envelope enough to see inside. His jaw dropped. It was the letter written by the comb-over man. David Williamson. They had their proof right here.

“We better get down there,” Marcus said.

“Shoe’s still out there somewhere,” Shy said. “He wants us to stall a little.”

“How ’bout we stall on the damn ship,” Marcus answered, picking up the radio.

Shy shrugged and zipped up the duffle and led the three of them back down the narrow trail that would eventually take them to the stairs. When they passed the hotel, though, he started thinking about Addie again. And the helicopter. He wondered if he should go try her hotel room one more time, just in case. And then something else occurred to him.

“Wait,” he said as they neared the top of the stairs.

Carmen and Marcus turned to look at him.

Shy glanced out at the ship, which was facing the island. He saw where the helicopter once was. If Addie’s dad was really still alive, he had to have been on that helicopter. And the helicopter had been on the researchers’ ship. Why would they let some random guy take their helicopter unless…

“Come on, Shy,” Carmen said.

Shy looked down at the beach. They had a perfect view from the top of the stairs. The passengers were all lined up and the research people were walking around them wearing backpacks. Green ones. Just like the one Bill had been wearing. The wrecked sailboat was gone. He thought about Shoeshine telling him to stay off the ship. Maybe he was saying for them to never get on the ship. Maybe it was a warning.

“Everyone’s lined up already,” Carmen said. “We gotta get down there.”

“Let’s go, man,” Marcus said, trying to pull Shy by the wrist.

“Hold up,” Shy said, yanking his arm free. “I gotta think.” He was remembering something else now: Shoeshine pulling the spray bottle out of Bill’s backpack, smelling the substance on the back of his hand. And the researchers he’d seen on the path, spraying the bushes and trees with this same kind of spray bottle.

“Shy!” Carmen shouted.

“We can’t go down there,” he said, looking up at her. “Not yet. We got time, right? They still gotta get the sick people on.”

They all turned to the water when two motorized rafts started buzzing toward shore from the ship. The drivers steered the rafts right up onto the golf-course grass and gave the researchers on land a thumbs-up.

“Look,” Marcus said. “You can hang around up here if you want, but I’m getting my ass on one of those rafts. Now. ” He turned to Carmen. “You coming with me?”

Carmen looked back at Shy with sad eyes. “I just wanna go home,” she told him.

“Me too,” Shy said, wiping a hand down his face. “But something’s not right.”

Shy moved closer to the edge of the cliff near the stairs when he heard one of the researchers start shouting orders. He watched over a dense wall of bushes. Instead of loading the first group of survivors onto the first raft, the team of researchers all reached into their green backpacks at the same time and pulled out machine guns. They aimed them at the line of survivors and started firing.

Screams filled the air.

The quick rattle of gunfire.

A few of the passengers tried to run, but no one made it more than a few steps before getting shot.

Shy ducked behind the edge of the cliff, pulling in quick breaths. Carmen and Marcus hurried back up the stairs and dove in behind him.

He watched horrified as body after body fell limp onto the putting green and the screams became fewer until there was nothing left but the sound of gunfire and nobody remained standing other than the researchers, who were not researchers at all but LasoTech security, just like Shy feared.

“Oh my God. Oh my God,” Carmen kept chanting in Shy’s ear.

Marcus only stared, his eyes bugged, mouth hanging open in shock.

Shy’s heart pounded in his chest. He couldn’t move. The men were now piling dead bodies onto the rafts, and several men on the ship were positioning two rocket launchers so they were aimed back at the island. Another man was lighting all the lifeboats on fire so there would be no way to escape the island. When he was done, he pointed up at the stairs and shouted something back at his guys, and soon two other men were raising their guns toward Shy, Marcus and Carmen and firing.

Shy ducked behind the tram and pulled Carmen and Marcus down with him, and the three of them held each other, trembling, as shots ricocheted all around them. Some continued on toward the hotel, causing mini-explosions in the walls and sparking fires. The trees and bushes were catching fire, too, and Shy immediately connected it with the substance in the spray bottles.

The gunfire lasted nearly a full minute, and when it let up for a few seconds, Shy lifted his head over the lip of the wall and saw that two of the gunmen were bounding up the stairs toward them.

“They’re coming!” Shy shouted, grabbing Carmen and Marcus by the backs of their shirts and yanking them to their feet. In seconds they were in a full sprint past the hotel and the gazebo, back up the trail, and all Shy could hear was bullets ripping through the bushes and trees around them and the muted sounds of their footfalls as they climbed higher up the cliffs.

Seconds later the gunfire stopped and Marcus shouted: “They’re leaving!”

Shy and Carmen stopped running, too, and spun around to watch the gunmen hurrying back down the trail, away from them. Shy pulled in desperate breaths next to Carmen and Marcus, who were both leaning over, hands on knees.

“Where are they going?” Marcus said between breaths.

Shy shook his head. He couldn’t comprehend any of it. Not the slaying of the survivors or the chase up the hill or why they’d just stopped and turned around. But he knew it wasn’t over.

Many of the trees and bushes down the hill were in flames, which lit up the darkening sky.

The three of them waited in silence.

“I’ll go look,” Shy said.

“You’re staying right here!” Carmen said, latching herself on to his arm. “What if they’re waiting for us?”