D. MacHale - SYLO

Olivia nodded. It sounded good to her too.

“You’re such a good friend, Tucker,” she said.

She leaned over Kent, and kissed me on the cheek.

I instantly felt Kent tense up.

“Whoa,” I said to him. “Take it easy.”

I shot Olivia an Are you crazy? Why did you do that? look.

She gave me a sly smile and an innocent shrug. Olivia was trouble. She cared about Kent, but I wasn’t sure if she felt as strongly about him as he did about her. It was a potentially dangerous situation that I wanted no part of. I stood up and backed off before things escalated again.

“Talk to me, Kent,” I said.

Kent was fighting the aggressive urges, but he was winning.

“I’m okay,” he said with labored breaths. “Or I will be.”

“Good. Then I’m gonna go.”

“Pierce?” Kent called. “I don’t know why I went after you like that.”

“I know,” I said. “You’re not going to do anything else stupid, are you? Like before the next game?”

I was hoping he knew what I meant without having to spell it out in front of Olivia.

“No chance,” he said.

I believed him.

“Good. Sit there and stay calm for a while.”

“What is it?” he asked like a confused little boy. “How could it do this?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I think we’ll find out soon.”

I took off and ran the rest of the way home with my eyes on the ground. I didn’t want to stumble across anything else that would add more drama to the already too-bizarre day. When I got to the house, I blasted in so quickly that I surprised Mom and Dad. Mom tried to hide it, but she had been crying.

So much for ducking more drama.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

Dad started to answer fast, but held back. It was like he hadn’t expected to have to explain anything just then and still needed time to figure out the proper response.

“Nothing,” was his eventual answer.

“Nothing?” I repeated, incredulous. “Why are you crying, Mom?”

“I…I’m just worried. That’s all.”

“About what?” I asked. “Besides everything?”

Dad was reluctant to answer, but he knew he didn’t have a choice.

“The TV works,” he said.

I waited. He didn’t continue.

“I’m not getting the tragedy in that,” I said, confused.

I looked at the TV. On the screen was the nightly six o’clock CNN news. Dad watched it every day. He liked the news guy, Dave Storm, but mostly it was because every night at six sharp, they had The Pemberwick Report . It was a live segment that told the world about what was happening on our island. Or at least they told the world what the government had been telling CNN. Mom thought Dave Storm was cute. I thought his name was probably made up…like he thought he was going to be a weatherman and ended up reading the news.

Dad took a deep breath and said, “We’re getting a TV signal. Radio too. We get news and shows and everything else.”

“So then what’s the problem?” I asked.

“What we’re not getting is out .”

“Out?”

“Phone service is gone,” Mom said. “So is the Internet. We can’t call, or text, or send e-mails.”

“Nothing is coming in either,” Dad added. “Nothing private, that is.”

I said, “So, maybe it’s just a power outage or something.”

Both Mom and Dad gave me these looks as if I were the most naïve person who had ever walked the face of the earth.

I said, “So we can’t talk to the rest of the world?”

“That’s right,” Dad said, “And that’s why Mom is crying.”

We spent the rest of the night watching TV, hoping for any news about why Pemberwick Island had had its communications cut off from the mainland, but there was nothing. The only update was that a few new cases of the virus in its early stages might have been identified and people had been brought to the hospital for observation and testing. The reporter said that the CDC was making steady progress and there was hope that they’d get to the bottom of the problem soon and blah, blah, blah.

There was nothing about the Ruby or the field of debris. There was no mention of the cigarette boat that was blown out of the water and the fact that two people were gunned down by SYLO killers, but I guess that was no surprise. It was torture not telling Mom and Dad about what I had seen but I followed Tori’s instincts. The less they knew, the better. It would all come out eventually. Of that I was certain. Once Granger and his army were gone and I felt safe, I’d talk to anybody who would listen about what we’d seen. I wondered how I might get in touch with somebody at the Boston Globe or the New York Times .

It had been an incredibly long day. The morning’s football game seemed like it had been played weeks before. My mind was racing in a million directions and if I hadn’t been totally exhausted, I never would have been able to fall asleep. Thankfully I nodded off fast and didn’t wake up until early the next morning.

When I got dressed and came out of my bedroom, Mom and Dad were already up and glued to the TV. I would have asked if they had been up all night but they were wearing different clothes.

Mom’s eyes were puffy and red. She had been crying again.

“Anything new?” I asked, not really sure that I wanted an answer.

“No, but there’s going to be an announcement soon,” Dad said. “Grab some breakfast.”

My heart started beating hard. Was this it? Did they figure out that the Ruby was to blame for the Pemberwick virus? Had somebody found the wreckage of the speedboat? I wasn’t hungry but couldn’t sit still so I grabbed some Cheerios and brought the bowl into the living room to join my parents. They were watching a Sunday morning news show that had nothing to do with Pemberwick Island. I watched the talking heads but didn’t register a single word anybody was saying. I couldn’t have cared less about what was happening with the rest of the world.

After about fifteen minutes, the screen went black. Seconds later, a SYLO logo appeared.

We all sat up straight. The logo stayed on the screen for a solid sixty seconds before it faded out and was replaced by the image of Captain Granger seated at a desk. The guy didn’t look any more comfortable than the last time he had been on the air. Only this time, I knew a little bit more about him and what he was capable of.

“Good morning,” he began. “I’m sure many of you know that there has been a massive failure of the communications infrastructure here on Pemberwick Island. While we are still able to receive digital data, the use of telephones, both hardwired and cellular, has been sporadic.”

“Sporadic?” Dad said, incredulous. “Try nonexistent.”

“Also, we are not able to access the Internet,” Granger continued. “Rest assured that the utility companies both here on Pemberwick Island and on the mainland are hard at work to identify the problem and restore service. Military communications have not been affected, so we are keeping tabs on the situation and will report the moment we have found a solution. We hope that we will all be back online and in touch shortly. Until then, we ask for your continued cooperation with the SYLO team during this time of inconvenience. Thank you.”

The picture dissolved back into the SYLO logo and moments later the news program picked up, in progress.

“I guess that’s it,” Mom said. She seemed relieved, as if she had been expecting some bad news.

“He’s full of it,” I declared.

“Why do you say that?” Dad asked.

“If there’s cable service, there’s Internet. And people have satellite phones. Satellites didn’t start falling out of the sky, did they?”