The song of the sirens echoed off the walls, and it had become maddening. She wanted to scream back, and so she did, opening her lips and crying out at them in wordless fury.
“Alena,” David said.
She turned to look at him. So handsome, her grandson. Only a few feet away, he climbed at her side, and now he focused on her, locking eyes.
“We’re almost there. Keep going.”
“Keep going,” she repeated. “Don’t tell me, kid. I’m in better shape than you’ll ever be.”
As he plastered himself to the shaft wall and slid his knee up, boot probing, he actually managed to smile at her, though fear and desperation glittered in his eyes. David hauled himself up a few more feet and Alena redoubled her efforts, keeping pace with him. She glanced down and caught her breath.
The darkness had come within six or seven feet of Josh, Tori, and Gabe. Lieutenant Stone and Voss were only a few feet higher. The sirens clung like leeches to the wall, black eyes gleaming like the volcanic rock. They had fifteen feet or so to reach the rim, and Alena didn’t think they were going to make it.
She reached up, not paying enough attention, and her fingers slipped off a tiny outcropping of rock. She slid, scraping her right cheek on the wall and banging her chest, bruising ribs, but she managed to catch herself.
David put out a hand to steady her, shifting his weight, and his foothold gave way, crumbling beneath him. His eyes went wide and he tried to grab hold of the wall, but his fingers scraped downward. Without a hand or foothold on the right side, and with his weight tilted that direction, he began to fall.
Alena screamed his name. Eyes wide, she watched as he pressed himself against the shaft wall, dragging bloody fingers down the black stone. One foot caught and his knee buckled and he nearly tipped backward but he shook it free and somehow managed to slow his descent and finally stop.
Not soon enough.
Half in darkness now, he looked up at her, his face still in sunlight. Instead of fear, his eyes were full of a terrible sadness and a kind of confusion, as if he did not know how he had come to be there.
Alena started to descend, half climbing and half sliding after him.
“Doctor, no!” Garbarino shouted. “Get out of the way!”
The sharpness of the command forced her to look up. Garbarino clung to the wall with one hand even as he used the other to grasp the strap of his assault rifle and swing it around from where it had dangled against his back. One-handed, he took aim. Beside him, the other sailor did the same, fumbling with the gun, foot slipping, getting a new toehold, barely hanging on.
“You’ll hit David!” Alena screamed at him.
Others were shouting as well, voices merging with the screeching song of the sirens, echoing around the shaft.
Garbarino ignored her, focused on David. “Head down!” he shouted.
Alena twisted again in time to see David press himself hard against the wall, even as he tried to climb with torn and bloody fingers. Garbarino fired, bullets tearing into the darkness, clipping stone outcroppings and ricocheting. Two of the sirens were ripped away from the wall by bullets and tumbled into the darkness, sickly, fishbelly-white bodies uncoiling as they fell.
But Garbarino and the other sailor couldn’t hit the ones coming up beneath David without shooting him as well, and as Alena watched, her grandson began to scream. Panic made him tear his gaze from hers, but she could not look away as the things swarmed over him. One of them, overzealous, scaled his body like a ladder but climbed too high, into the sunlight, where it smoldered and ignited and screamed. Its serpentine lower body twisting, it shoved off from the wall and plunged into the water below, the splash dousing its fire and its cries.
“Damn it!” Garbarino shouted.
From the corner of her eye, Alena caught his movement. He tried to scramble to one side, searching for a better angle, a cleaner shot, and he lost his grip. As he fell, panic seized him and he pulled the trigger, but the bullets chipped at the stone walls with little effect and then Garbarino screamed the rest of the way, following the siren into the water, from which he would never surface.
“Alena!” David shrieked, voice ragged as they tore at him. “Go!”
But Stone and Voss had been in motion all along, and now they opened fire, shooting the sirens that were attacking him. One by one, the creatures peeled off the wall and fluttered into the abyss.
“Climb, David!” Alena shouted.
Somehow, he did. She could see the agony etched into his features and she wondered what his legs must look like after the sirens’ jaws had been at work, and the suckers on their hands had scoured the flesh. But he climbed.
Voss shot at the things that were still coming up as Stone edged over beside David to speed him along.
“Climb, damn it!” David shouted up at her.
That got Alena moving.
“We’re out!” Lieutenant Commander Sykes called from above. “Move it!”
And then Alena felt a hand grip her wrist and looked up to see Voss and Mays reaching for her. They hauled her over the rim, onto a thick mat of vegetation, trees sparse overhead. She climbed to her feet and glanced at the horizon, where the sun slid rapidly into the water. Its light reached only a few feet into the cave they had just escaped, and the leech-white creatures stirred at the edges of the dark, ready to erupt in pursuit the moment the last sliver of the sun vanished in the west.
The high, keening melody diminished, and then she heard Sykes barking into a radio and the roar of helicopter rotors not far off.
Gabe, Tori, and Josh crawled out of the cave shaft. Voss and the nameless sailor lifted the sweating, glassy-eyed Josh to his feet, even as Alena went to help Stone haul David out onto the ground.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
It was a foolish question. The legs of his trousers were soaked with blood and his hands were scraped raw. He swayed, barely able to remain sitting up.
“Not yet,” he murmured. “Get us out of here.”
“Which way?” Tori said, shouting to be heard, all of them casting frantic looks into the shaft.
Sykes raised a hand and pointed down the hill — for they were on the mountainside now. “There! West toward the sun, stay in the light as long as you can, but run for the beach! The chopper’s coming down there!”
As Stone bent to lift David in a fireman’s carry, Alena looked down into the shaft and saw those pale, hideous faces with their black eyes staring back. But they were not the only things out of place. Spaced all around the shaft’s rim there were small gray rectangles — explosive charges that had been set sometime in the past few hours. A radio signal would set them all off at once, and the idea woke her up. She stared at the sirens and hatred filled her. It gave her back some strength, but she knew it wouldn’t last.
Then they were all running, Josh staggering, and Tori grabbed her wrist as she went by. Alena careened through the trees with her, branches whipping at her face, and as she caught a fresh glimpse of the horizon, the sun going down, shadows gathering all around them in the trees and brush, a single thought filled her mind.
Detonate. Push the goddamn button. Burn them all.
88
On the bridge of the USS Hillstrom, Ed Turcotte watched the sun slide into the Caribbean with a horrid fascination. His every muscle taut, he glanced back and forth between Captain Siebalt and the communications officer. A terrible weight bore down on every man and woman there as the last of the golden daylight faded.
“Sir?” the communications officer said, glancing at the captain. “Mr. Keck’s awaiting the detonation order.”
Siebalt glared at him, and Turcotte knew that look. Don’t tell me my business, it said. He had given the look enough times himself.
Every cave and vent the sweep teams could find out on the island had been mined with charges as the afternoon wore on, even as others explored tunnels and tried radio and phone signals to get some update on the people they had lost below and those who had gone down after them. All of the ships had moved in closer to the island after the Antoinette had been scuttled — but not too close, the captains far too wary of sharing the freighter’s fate. The choppers had evacuated all personnel just before dusk, but now kept doing flyovers, searching for some sign of the Boudreaus, Voss, and Hart, and the others who were inside the warren of tunnels in the island’s womb.
Bud Rouleau, the Kodiak’s captain, had kept his Coast Guard ships close, but he deferred to Siebalt, just as Turcotte had to. In the wake of the clusterfuck on the Kodiak’s deck, with the Tyree woman’s death and the destruction of the creature they’d retrieved from the Antoinette—their one test subject — the civilian chopper had been grounded. Nobody would be allowed to leave the area until someone took control of this mess, and right now the person in control was either dead, or they were about to kill her.
Siebalt took a deep breath, glanced at the sliver of the sun still visible out on the ocean, the horizon striated with color, and turned as though to give the order.
“Don’t!” Turcotte snapped.
Captain Siebalt shot him a dark look. “Dr. Boudreau left us with an order—”
“Yeah, David Boudreau. He’s a kid, for Christ’s sake. You can’t detonate with all of those people still unaccounted for! We both have people still out there.”
“We did,” Siebalt said, his gray eyes hard. “In a minute, it will be full-on dark. Anyone left in those tunnels is dead. And anyone on the island will be. My orders are to blow the place and kill as many as we can.”
“You won’t get them all now anyway,” Turcotte snapped.
Siebalt turned away, looking to the communications officer. The whole bridge was silent. “We’ll start cleanup at dawn. For now, we follow our orders. Lieutenant Chang, the order is given. Detonate.”
“Yes, sir,” the communications officer replied. He tapped a key on his console. “The order is given—”
But Lieutenant Chang didn’t finish. He raised a hand to the earpiece of his headset and turned in his seat. “Captain, message coming through from Chopper Three. They’re out. Lieutenant Commander Sykes is radioing for evac.”
Turcotte whispered the first grateful prayer he’d said in years.