D. MacHale - SYLO

We were in, but was it too late? I killed the engine and jumped out in time to see Quinn swinging the big barn doors closed.

“Did I leave tracks out there?” I asked, breathless.

“Too late to worry about that now,” he replied.

Quinn and I leaned against the door, listening intently as the roar of the helicopter grew louder. Tori stayed with the horses, petting them and getting them to relax as best as she could. I couldn’t say which was beating faster, the rotors or my heart. The ground trembled as the powerful chopper flew closer. I wanted to peek out of the window next to the door but was afraid I’d be seen, so all I did was close my eyes and wait. A shadow moved across the sky, blotting out the sun that streamed through the glass. The helicopter was hovering directly overhead. The sound was so deafening that Quinn put his hands over his ears. The shadow remained for a good thirty seconds. Did they spot the tire tracks? Had they seen us scramble to get inside? Were soldiers dropping down on zip lines?

The shadow finally moved off and the sound of the chopper lessened. I held my breath. They might be gone, or they might have been drifting further down the driveway to find a safe landing spot.

The sound grew fainter. They weren’t landing. They were leaving.

I looked toward Quinn. His wide, frightened eyes asked the same question I had: Are they gone? It took several seconds for the sound of the helicopter to disappear altogether and that answered the question. They were gone. But had they left any soldiers behind? None of us moved for a solid five minutes. Once the ringing in my ears from the monstrous engine dissipated, I listened for any sounds of movement outside. There was nothing.

Tori was the first to move. She left the horses, grabbed a long, wood-handled boat hook, and tossed it to me. What was I going to do with that? Skewer a soldier? I wasn’t about to do that…but I didn’t give it up either. Tori raised her shotgun back to her shoulder and motioned for Quinn to open one of the barn doors.

He slowly eased the big door open, the squeaking of the hinges tearing through the silence. We all peeked out, fearing that we would be faced with a squad of armed soldiers.

The property was empty.

“Let’s go to the house,” Tori whispered. She still had the shotgun up and level to the ground.

The three of us moved quickly across the stretch of gravel between the barn and the house while constantly glancing around to see if any of the SYLO soldiers had been left behind. We made it inside and Tori quickly closed and bolted the door. It seemed silly to lock it, but if it made her feel better, I wasn’t going to criticize. Once we were in and feeling relatively safe, we had to face the reality of the situation.

“What is this thing that’s going to happen?” Tori asked. The wild look in her eyes was gone. She was back in control of herself.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Granger called it an event …whatever that means. They don’t want anybody on Pemberwick to know about it for fear there’ll be a riot.”

“They don’t want anybody anywhere to know about it!” Quinn exclaimed. “Why else would they cut off communications with the mainland?”

“Is it about the virus?” Tori asked.

Quinn and I exchanged looks.

“There is no virus,” I announced. “We hacked into the hospital database. There’s no record of anybody having been treated for the Pemberwick virus.”

Quinn added, “And we heard Granger admit it, so that pretty much is that.”

“And that’s why they’re after us,” I added. “They know we know the truth and don’t want us to blow the lid off the deception.”

“So then, what about the Ruby?” Tori asked. “And the people who died?”

“I don’t know,” I said, trying not to sound defeated. “I don’t know how any of this fits together.”

We let that frustrating thought hang in the air.

Tori broke the silence by asking, “Your parents are with them?”

I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me or Quinn. Didn’t matter. We both had the same answer.

“Yes,” we answered simultaneously.

“How?” she asked. “Why? I mean, are they just going along with Granger or is it something more than that?”

“I don’t know!” I yelled with frustration. “I’m suddenly questioning everything I ever knew. Why did we move here? Why this island? My parents talked about moving someplace safe but it sure didn’t seem all that dangerous in Greenwich. Whatever the truth is, my parents haven’t been honest with me for a long time.”

Tori gave a questioning look to Quinn.

“Don’t look at me,” he responded with a shrug. “I don’t get it either. But it makes me think that this started long before last week.”

“What do you mean?” Tori asked.

“How could our parents suddenly be up to speed so fast? Whatever it is that’s got this island in its grip, it stands to reason that they’ve known about it for a while. Before SYLO showed up. Before people started dying. Probably before either of us moved here. Heck, for all we know it may be why we moved here! I have no idea. The implications make my head hurt.”

Quinn’s logic was flawless, as usual. But if he was right, my parents had been keeping a huge secret from me for a very long time. A secret that changed our lives. I loved Pemberwick Island. Unlike most of my friends, I expected to live there the rest of my life. Now I had to accept the fact that I might not want to live here for another minute.

Tori walked over to a window that looked out onto the lagoon behind her house. It was getting late in the day. Shadows were growing long. Her father’s two lobster boats bobbed gently against the dock. Under other circumstances I would have thought it was the perfect postcard image of Maine.

“We’re prisoners on this island,” she finally said. “All of us. What we don’t know is why.”

“The three of us are worse than prisoners,” Quinn said. “We’re fugitives.”

Tori kept staring out at the lagoon but her mind was somewhere else.

“What will happen if they catch us?” she asked.

“Who knows?” I replied. “They don’t want us telling anybody what we know, so I guess they’ll lock us up until, well, until the event happens that they’re talking about. That’s the best we could expect.”

“And the worst?” Tori asked.

I didn’t have an answer for that.

“People have to know,” she said flatly. “Not just here on Pemberwick. On the mainland. They have to know what’s happening. The only way to stop it is to shine a light on it.”

“We don’t have a light that big,” Quinn said. “Or a cell phone that works. There’s no way.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Tori said and pointed out of the window.

She was pointing at her father’s lobster boats.

I didn’t understand. Did her father have radios on board? That didn’t seem to matter. If SYLO could disrupt cell service, they could definitely jam radio signals.

It was Quinn who put it together first. “Are you serious?” he asked, stunned.

“About what?” I asked, stupidly.

“This is a small island,” she said. “We can’t hide forever. God knows what they’ll do once they get us. We’ve seen what Granger’s capable of. If he’s going to hunt us, I say we make it as tough for him as possible.”

“And how do we do that?” I asked.

Tori looked me square in the eye and said, “We escape.”

The idea was so far-fetched that I actually laughed.

“Why is that funny?” she asked, dead serious.

“It’s not,” I said. “It’s just…it’s just…dumb. How would we do that?”

“We’ll take one of my father’s boats. There’s no moon tonight and the sea is calm. I’ll bet we can slip past those warships without anybody even noticing.”