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.
89
Tori ran so fast she could barely keep her legs beneath her, and somehow Josh kept pace. His face had gone pale as the moon and he held his arm tight to his body as they careened down the hill together. Gravity seemed to give him the momentum and speed he needed, but how he kept his feet under him she had no idea. Voss dodged around trees and crashed through vegetation to Tori’s left. Up ahead, Alena Boudreau navigated with remarkable grace, alongside the lieutenant she’d heard called Stone, who carried David over one shoulder, sometimes running and sometimes staggering under the burden. Lieutenant Commander Sykes and the other surviving sailors — Mays and Crowley — ran a dozen yards ahead of them.
In the shadows of the trees and the thick tangles of brush, night had already fallen. A sliver of sunlight remained on the horizon ahead, but it could not reach those dark places. The last golden light of day splashed the island in broad swathes, and Tori aimed for those, darting from light into shadow and then into twilight again. Her face burned like it was on fire — blood rushing through her, flushing her skin — but from the back of her neck and all down her back, Tori felt cold. That was the chill of vulnerability, the icy weight of the creatures’ attention.
For they were there, in the shadows already. She caught a glimpse of sickly white as she sprinted from one splash of light to another, moving from a small slash of black rock, a narrow cave in the face of the hill. Only one of them, and only that cave, but there had to be others beginning to emerge.
No one screamed to run. They were long past such urgings, and fleeing for their lives now. Her breath came in gasps and gulps and her arms pumped at her sides. Branches whipped at her face and she brushed them aside, her focus alternating between Josh — whose every step brought a grunt of pain — and the horizon, where the sun seemed to melt into the darkness of the ocean, her skin prickling with awareness of the hunger that exuded from the island. And all along their path, the maddening song of the sirens began to rise from a whisper to a wail.
At the bottom of the hill, they hit a clearing of rock and scrub and Tori searched frantically for any sign of a cave, but saw none. From here she could see, through sparser trees ahead, the white sand of the beach and the indigo gleam and white foam of the water beyond. The sun only peeked over the edge of the world now, and she knew that, close as they were, they would never make it. The song rose, and she could picture the creatures in her mind, climbing out of their watery caves or slithering up onto shore.
They had seconds. A minute or two at most.
Josh faltered and nearly went sprawling. She reached out to grab his hand, but Voss beat her to it, pulling hard on Josh’s wrist.
“Run, goddammit!”
Tori didn’t know if the woman meant her or Josh, but she put on speed. Voss hauled Josh along beside her, shouting at him not to fall, to put one foot in front of the other.
Lieutenant Stone stumbled, and he and David Boudreau went sprawling. David cried out in pain at the impact on his bloody legs, but then Mays and Crowley were there, hoisting him up again. This time Crowley carried him, with Stone and Mays on either side, ready to take over if necessary. They weren’t going to leave anyone behind.
Alena kept pace with the sailors who were trying so hard to save her grandson’s life.
Left arm pinned to his side, Josh careened toward a ridge of black rock. He managed to plant his foot on it and spring forward. Tori felt sure he would trip and fall, but still he crashed forward.
Watching him, Tori stepped on a stone, twisted her ankle, threw out her arms for balance and tried to get her feet under her again, only to catch the toe of her boot on a root. She fell hard, rolling over twice, a third time, slamming her back against a ridge of stone.
In shadow.
To her right, the darkness had grown thick. The singsong voice of the sirens had taken on an almost taunting air and as she rolled to her knees and started to rise, she saw them in the trees — three of the creatures moving low to the ground, in the brush, out of the twilight. They slid toward her, too fast.
In the same moment, she realized the little light around her had become moonlight. The last of the sun had vanished into the ocean. Up at the top of the hill, the sirens would be swarming out of the volcanic shaft. They were close enough to hear the roar of the chopper’s rotors, out on the beach, maybe fifty yards away, but she would die here in the night’s shadows.
But Tori didn’t give up. She pistoned her legs, leaping to her feet, and turned to run.
“Get down!” Josh snapped.
Tori had no time to think. She dropped to her knees again just as Josh and Rachael Voss strode toward her with the righteous purpose that came with authority, guns raised. They had only pistols, not the Navy’s assault weapons, but they fired again and again, and the bullets tore the sirens apart.
It was all Josh had. He dropped the gun, swaying on his feet, and nearly fell. He would have, if Tori and Voss hadn’t been there to prop him up, and then they were nearly dragging him through fifty feet of sparse trees toward the beach.