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?”
“We have to help the sick people,” Shy said.
Marcus was shaking his head. “Let’s get off the trail. Maybe we’ll be able to see the ship from the edge of the cliff.”
They stepped off the trail together, Shy leading the way, until they were at the edge of the cliff, where they looked out over the ocean. Their angle was poor, but Shy saw one of the rafts at the side of the ship, and the researchers pulling the dead bodies up into the ship. They didn’t want to leave any evidence of what they’d done.
“Where’s Shoeshine?” Shy asked.
No one answered.
As soon as the last of the bodies was loaded onto the ship, the gunmen climbed aboard, too, and then a group of them pulled the rafts up.
“They’re all on,” Shy said. “We have to go get the sick people out of the hotel and down to the beach. Part of the hotel is already on fire.”
Just after he said these words a ball of fire shot across the water from the ship and crashed into the side of the hotel, and the wall exploded in flames.
More thunderous shots came from the ship, the sound exploding all around the island, the hotel taking blow after blow until the whole thing was in flames, including the penthouse where some of the patients had still been alive. Shy had never seen anything like it. The men were firing rocket launchers at the island, trying to burn everything down. He was choking on fear now.
They started running again, back down the trail, Shy leading with no idea where he was going. But then a ball of fire landed in the brush right in front of them and without saying a word all three of them spun back around and took off, back up the hill.
Every other tree and bush they passed was on fire, the flames leaping from branch to branch, reaching into the sky, lighting up everything. Smoke blanketed the path, and soon they were all coughing and covering their mouths with their shirts. There was nowhere to go, no safe place. They were going to be burned alive with everything else.
Suddenly, another man came ripping through a patch of burning bushes and fell to the ground, rolling to put out the flames on his clothes. Then he sprang to his feet.
Shoeshine.
“It’s napalm!” he shouted. “They’re torching the entire island! Follow me!”
Shy sprinted after Shoeshine, Carmen and Marcus right behind him. They took the trail up the hill, fire spreading all around them.
Shy couldn’t think, but he could run. And he was hyperaware of his surroundings. The flames and the smoke and each twist and turn Shoeshine made and Carmen and Marcus running behind him.