The Dead of Summer, page 24
“Cnidaria imperia—”
“Whatever. The point is, we have a real shot at this. What do you think?”
“I think you’re a naive idiot.”
Elisa flinches like I’ve thrown sand into her face, and I kind of have, but she doesn’t give up.
“Ollie, I would love to give you the time to grieve, but from where I’m sitting you’ve had ten months, plus some, to prepare. I didn’t even get a second. And in the end, you got to say goodbye. Most people don’t. I know what you’re feeling is truly immeasurable, but we don’t have time for infinite sadness. That thing is out there, and the second this mist clears up, I guarantee AMIOS is going to send out drones or something to find us. We need to act.”
I finally look her in the eye. “We’re three people, Elisa. Three kids.”
“Who have done more to uncover this island’s mystery than anyone since my mom! Don’t you see how close we are?” She rises to her knees, like she’s begging me to hear her. “We’ve faced the impossible before, haven’t we? Remember our third fight? Remember Crabigail? And what about the time we hijacked the Scuttlebutt’s float at the Pride Parade? Or a million other schemes and pranks that should have gotten us grounded for life but didn’t? This is no different. If there has ever been a time to shine, Orlando Veltman, it’s now.”
I scoff. Her optimism is enraging. “Elisa, the second we get on that ship, we’re dead. This isn’t one of our little games. We can’t pretend our way to saving the world.”
“Pretend? Who’s pretending?”
“Oh, come on. You are one wig away from being Wendy-freaking-Pretendy, Elisa. Grow up.”
“Oh yeah?” Elisa gets on her feet now, shouting down at me. “Well, I’d rather be Wendy Pretendy than … than … Heidi Gaslighty!”
I gasp. How dare she evoke Heidi G at a time like this. There aren’t many lines left for us to cross with each other, but that’s one of them. It’s the last thing I expect and I can’t help but laugh.
“Elisa, look around! Our town is totally destroyed, and the only hope of survival we have is a fleet of evil marine biologists who want to keep us in cages. And even if we do find a way to fight the coral, what’s the point? The sand is poisoned. The island is sick. Everyone we care about is going to die, so what the fuck is there left to save?”
Elisa pulls herself up. It’s like she stands utterly alone in the mist.
“We save each other, dipshit.”
My face prickles with heat. I know she’s right. Worse, she knows she’s right. It just makes me angrier. Still, when she reaches out a hand to hoist me up, I take it. It’s only then that I notice something.
“Where’s Bash?”
A single set of footprints breaks away from our scuffle, running off between the dunes. We dash after him, snatching up discarded clothes as we follow the trail through tufts of cordgrass. Then the grass thickens, and we lose him.
“Shit. Shit!” Elisa spins. She gathers her hair up with her hands, like she does just before a meltdown. “Do we split up?”
“No,” I say firmly. “Maybe. I don’t know!”
“Ollie, what if that thing is out there?”
“Bridezilla?”
“Oh my god, you named it?”
A boy cries out in the distance. We run through the grass, letting it nip and slice at our skin. At the top of a tall dune, we find Bash standing with his hands on his hips. He’s nearly nude and covered in scratches, but suddenly he wears a massive smile.
“Look!” he gloats, grabbing our hands. For a moment I fear his sudden, euphoric energy, but then I feel it catching in my own throat as I see what he’s found.
We’re on the beach. The ocean, barely visible, laps at the edges of the mist. The sand is dotted with toppled umbrellas and chairs abandoned long ago. Nestled into the grass, half-covered in seaweed, is a shock of pink plastic. A cooler. A cooler we all recognize from the morning after our final slumber party.
Bash pries it open with a maniacal laugh. It’s still full! By now all the ice inside has melted, setting adrift a fleet of bottled drinks and bags of chips, but it’s almost better this way. We take turns holding up the cooler for one another to drink from, and it’s like guzzling a miracle. Only a few minutes later the sodas and chips are consumed, yet it feels like an entire era has passed between now and the fight Elisa and I were having. Even the mist seems to clear.
“I take it back,” Bash says through a mouthful. “Don’t kill me. I thought I was dying, but I just needed a little snack.”
“Push me like that again and not even the littlest snack will save you,” Elisa says. They hug each other.
I turn away from the ocean, searching for only a moment before I find what I’m looking for. A great house hovers behind us in the mist.
Sam’s house.
Just like Elisa says, the mist clears by the late afternoon and the sky fills with the thwap thwap thwap of helicopters. It’s impossible to know if we covered our tracks well enough in the sand, so we make sure we’re ready for the moment Easter’s forces arrive at Sam’s house. It happens right as the sun sets, with a centipede of vehicles rushing down the driveway and trampling the lawn to make sure we’re surrounded. We know there’s no point in resisting, so we stand on the back porch, hands raised, and let them load us—separately—into the caravan.
Before that, we sat and watched the sunset together on the deck, pointing out every little color to one another while we told old stories. New stories, too, like the time Bash saved my life with lemonade, and the time we watched the most powerful drag queen on earth run an apocalyptic library like the navy, and the time the staff of Pizza Monster broke their non-delivery rule to answer a distress call in the dunes that became a slumber party at the end of the world. And even though we try to write it into a myth, none of us can get through the story about how Sam came into our lives, changed everything, and then vanished. The injustice is too fresh, and Sam’s ghost feels too close, like at any moment he will rush in with that goofy, promising smile on his face. But we checked every room of this big, lonely house. Sam never made it home.
Before the capture, and before the sunset, when the afternoon sun had just begun to burn away the mist, we sat on the floor of Sam’s living room and we made a plan. Like most of our schemes, it’s a bad idea taken incredibly seriously. It starts with spreading all of Doro’s notes around us, then bottling it all back up in the souvenir tumbler. It ends with a walk back to the beach, a deposit in the evidently indestructible cooler, and then a spontaneous art project: First, we find branches of driftwood and construct a tiny, twisted tree, then we commence a scavenger hunt for the best stones and shells. We use what we find to make an X, like an old pirate map. A promise that there is something to be found here, for the next person who dares to look.
And before all that, when the mist still bearded the beach and we felt like just three kids outside time and space enjoying a snack on a cloudy day, we held hands and reminded one another of the world’s most fundamental and unbreakable rule.
Suds stick together.
* * *
Suds stick together. I repeat our motto in my head as I try to slow down my breathing. I’m in the back seat of a van, a bag yanked over my head, a gun jabbed up against my ribs.
“Orders?” a man asks. Not me, obviously.
Another man says, “Keep that hood on him. We don’t know if they’re contagious. The director wants them brought right to isolation while we finish transferring the rest of the stock to Embrace. Whatever you do, do not let them communicate. The way the director talks about these three, it’s like they’re telepathic.”
I can’t help but smile under my hood.
“These are the kids that took out Barbara and her unit in the marsh?” the first man asks.
“Affirmative. Little pyromaniac fucks lit them right up. Bashed Bab’s helmet in, too. Truly sick.”
The gun digs into my thin T-shirt. They think we killed the guards who chased us into the marsh?
“That wasn’t us,” I start to say, but something blunt slams into my temple. I awaken seconds later to laughter and a nauseating ache that fills my mouth with bile.
“Do it again!” someone up front begs. “I missed it!”
I brace myself for another hit, but suddenly the vehicle swerves and all the guards are shouting.
“Did you see that?”
“What was that out in the marsh?”
“Too big to be a tank.”
The radios in the car whisper with static and, even in my delirium, I know the answer. I can barely hear through the shouting, but if I could, I know the chorus of screams currently charging the caravan would have lyrics, and those lyrics would be full of chapels, and love, and marriage.
Shit, I think. This is not the plan.
The men are yelling at one another. The driver swerves again, and the car is suddenly rumbling over uneven terrain. Someone is shouting, “Go, go, go!” And even through the hood I can see the glaring red lights of AMIOS filling the car.
While everyone is distracted, I grab at my hood and yank it off.
We’re almost there. We’re almost inside the walls.
We don’t make it.
The jeep is crushed from above.
AUGUST 18
28 DAYS AFTER
08:55
“Do not feed the bridezilla!”
Early this morning, ahead of my final interview with TS188, I visited the ruins of AMIOS.
By now all scientific operations have been transferred aboard the Embrace, per Pfaff’s orders. She calls it our stronghold. Not much could be salvaged from the explosion without risk of contamination, which is probably why the remaining security forces were surprised at my arrival. I told them what I needed and flashed my credentials. They obliged, showing me to an armored van crowded with monitors. Most had gone dark—the CCTV network had gone offline during the explosion, too. I asked them if they had a copy of the footage from the final moments, as I had requested. They produced a tape labeled “Bridezilla.” Here is what I saw:
The camera fixes on the back lot, where the temporary quarantine camps were erected. Machinery has been affixed to the lamppost. These I recognize as ranged incendiary devices, or flamethrowers, as is made clear at the 22:O2 mark. The scorch marks on the ground indicate quite a significant range.
In the footage, people are being lined up at gunpoint by guards. The guards all wear head and face coverings, while people in hazmat suits appear to be counting the crowd. I believe this is the moment before many of these people were brought onto the USNS Embrace. For the most part, the people stand with their heads down, but about six minutes into the footage the entire crowd flinches. There is no sound to the video, but it’s clear something loud draws everyone’s attention in a single direction. People’s mouths open. They wail silently. They cower. A shadow flows over the pandemonium, indicating something quite large has crossed over the floodlights of the courtyard. Then everything begins to shake, and the camera suffers a blow. When the image clears, the viewer feels as though they are hanging sideways over a different perspective of the courtyard. Now we can see the large metal gates have bulged inward, and the mangled face of a jeep shines into the camera. The glare makes it quite hard to see what has thrown the jeep into such a predicament.
People scramble across the frame. Many of them have their wrists zip-tied, held at their waist as they run. People trip, fall, are trampled. The soldiers, when visible, raise their guns at something behind the glare of the jeep.
The crushed jeep shudders as something barrels over it, into the courtyard. The camera can’t adjust quick enough to see the details. I attempt to brighten and adjust contrast, but the creature’s shape is baffling. An abundance of legs beneath a bulbous, armored body trailing prehensile tendrils. Arthropodal, vaguely. Hellish, certainly. Spikes of distinctly coral shapes ridge its back, seeming to form an exoskeleton cage around exposed organs. Wet, pulsing organs.
The creature spins, distressed in the courtyard’s brightness. It collides with the camera, badly diminishing the video quality. Then the video goes dark.
This is not the only video I recovered from AMIOS. I asked the security officers if the jeeps had dashboard cams. They did. I asked them to take me to the jeep crushed in the video. It had not been moved, though by now it was almost completely colonized with C. imperia. Light pink, losing color as the officers doused it with the chemical A6-II, but still alive. It was getting bright, close to the time the reefs are most “awake,” so I had to act quickly. I reached my arm into the crushed car and ripped the device from the windshield. I have it on my desk now. It is badly crushed, but the card inside appears intact. Here is what it shows, picking up moments after the jeep is crushed:
The dashboard camera peers directly into the courtyard. Through its eye, we can see the crowd of people pressed up against the courtyard’s eastern wall. There are maybe one hundred adults and children, all struggling to get far away from the creature as it finally sees them.
(I should note that it is unclear exactly where the creature’s eyes are located. Zoological analysis indicates its sensory awareness extends in all directions. And while it is drawn to light, it is most sensitive to sound. This might be why it is drawn to the screaming crowd.)
Because the creature is still backlit, it remains shielded in black contrast, though that will soon change. We can see a pair of malformed pincers at the end of one limb, which it uses to swat away the few guards still attempting to shoot it. The bullets do little, only knocking knobs of coral to the concrete. The knobs, along with the rest of the growths atop the creature’s back, begin to emit a strange vapor. Heavy, like dry ice, and colors that seem to baffle the camera recording.
The guards pinned under “Bridezilla” are drowned first, vanishing from view. The vapor flows toward the trapped people. The few visible children in the shot are crushed backward in desperate attempts by the adults to shield them from exposure.
Then, from the side, one girl runs. She is Elisabete D’Oliveira, instantly recognizable as she faces up, into the floodlights. She grabs one of the fallen guns and turns it toward a fuel tank directly above the creature. She hits it, showering the creature in incendiary fluid, but it does not ignite. The creature stalks toward her. She is forced to retreat, to the crowd, but then she sees where another of the tanks is dangling from its perch. She heaves the hanging nozzle around, pointing it at the creature. She hits it, trying to activate the pilot light, but nothing happens.
The creature draws closer. She slams it again. And again. The flamethrowers never ignite.
The vapor is around her ankles now. The creature is entirely focused on her, readying itself to charge.
This part is where I must make several assumptions. First, based on body language, I assume young Elisabete was able to smell or hear the gas hissing out of the valve directly above her. Second, based on facial expression, it is evident to me that the girl reached some sort of resolve. During the following action, which is clearly visible through the jeep’s camera, Elisabete never breaks eye contact with the creature.
My final assumption is that when Elisabete reaches into her pocket and lifts up a lighter, it is the missing lighter of her mother, Doroteia D’Oliveira.
One flick, two, and fire appears in Elisabete’s hand.
Briefly, the jeep camera is overcome with a glare that gradually resolves into a cone of fire washing over “Bridezilla.” The vapor is burned away, drawn up into a sudden gust by the heat. For the first time, we can see the many stolen body parts that comprise the creature, though it is impossible to make any identifications. All I can make out are several tattered sashes waving from the creature’s spine, like pennants, one of which clearly says “Bride or die” before burning off. The fire throws the creature backward, causing it to collide with another tower, and a final explosion blinds the jeep’s camera, ending the visual.
The recording does not end. There is one final detail I will now mention: Unlike the CCTV camera, the dash cam of the jeep has sound. Mostly it picks up static pouring through the radios, but as the creature burns, the static thins, and a passenger within the jeep can be heard crying. They sound crushed into the back seat, struggling. The final noise is a smash of glass and then there is the sound of what I assume is the person being rescued from the wreck.
The way the person screams, they have not been rescued by someone they think will save them.
I can’t feel my legs. They’re beneath me, but it’s like floating in a bath of needles. I’m being dragged through a flaming courtyard. Heat sucks the moisture from my mouth, my eyes, and ashes coat my throat. If Bridezilla is the smoldering pile against the tents, what’s the monster that’s got me by the arm?
“I will not let you brats ruin everything I have worked for.”
Imogen Pfaff has me with one hand while the other hoists, of all things, a metal tackle box.
Is she going on a fishing trip? At a time like this? The pain in my left leg is pushing through the numbness now, making me delirious. Each step puts me closer to blacking out, but I can’t abandon my body now. We had a plan. What was the plan? Where are Bash and Elisa?
Pfaff pushes me toward a group of survivors huddled where Elisa fell, but I don’t see her. I only see a blackened limb jutting from the huddle. It’s still clutching a gleaming metal lighter.
NO.
“Elisa!” I scream her name, but my voice is a desperate rasp. “Elisa, get up!” The fire she created was like the engines of a rocket ship, and she conjured it with her bare hands. The last I saw her, she was engulfed in the blue blaze, all of her blackened by the sudden brightness.
