Barrel Key was one long chain of warehouses and boat shops, big metal storehouses and bait-and-tackle shacks leaning over on their foundations. The sky, she noticed, was greenish, and only when she rolled her window down and the acrid smell of burning reached her did she realize that the wind had carried ash from Spruce Island.
“Wow,” Pete said as they passed a single motel, the M in its sign burned out, buzzing the word vacancy at them like a threat. “Great vacation spot. Very, um, authentic.”
“It’s more of a working vacation,” she said, because she knew he wouldn’t drop it otherwise.
“What kind of work? You a world-class fly fisherman or something? Or trying to re-up on ammunition?” This as they were passing a lean-to advertising both farm-fresh eggs and major firearms. “Do you want to tell me what you’re really doing here?”
Gemma hesitated. “I can’t,” she said. It wasn’t a lie. She didn’t know exactly what she expected to find, only that the universe seemed to be pointing here, toward Haven. A battered sign showed the way to the marina. “Turn right here.”
She kept the window down, straining for a glimpse of Spruce Island, but the buildings kept intruding and the ocean was only visible in brief flashes. Here, at least, the town was not nice, exactly, but nicer: another motel, this one with all its letters intact; diners and bars, stores with colorful lures displayed in the windows, a T-shirt shop and a restaurant with outdoor seating. In the distance she heard a sound she thought must be the roar of waves, but as they grew closer she made out human voices. A helicopter passed overhead, then another.
The road curved and they were prevented from going any farther by a series of sawhorses in the road and cops grimly gesturing them to turn around. Beyond the roadblock was the marina, and hundreds and hundreds of people gathered there, shouting and chanting and waving homemade signs. Beyond them, the spiky masts of small sailboats bobbing up and down in the water. A column of smoke was visible here, tufting up into the sky from somewhere up the coast and smearing the sun to a strange orange color.
A cop rapped on the driver’s-side window, and Pete rolled it down. “You’re going to have to turn around,” the cop said. He was suited up in riot gear and carrying three guns that Gemma could see.
“That’s where we’re going,” Gemma said, gesturing to the angry crowd at the marina, and Pete gave her a look like, We are?
“Turn around,” the cop said. “Nothing to see here.”
“Except for the huge fireball and all the people going nutty,” Pete said. Gemma elbowed him as the cop leaned down to stare at them through the window. “But otherwise you’re right, nothing to see. Nothing at all.” A second cop was moving toward them, and Pete quickly put the car in reverse. “Have a nice day!” he shouted, even as he was backing haphazardly up the street. The two cops stood there, staring after them, until they’d turned around in the parking lot of a hardware store and started back in the direction they’d come.
“Well, that was a lovely day trip,” Pete said as they left the marina behind. “Where to now? Any natural disasters you want to visit? Prison camps? Political riots?”
Gemma spotted a vacant parking lot behind a long line of low-ceilinged storage units. “Pull over here,” she said.
Pete turned to stare at her. “Are you serious?”
“Please. Just do it.” It felt good to give orders, to have a plan, to be out on her own, to do what she wanted without having to beg for permission. Something leapt to life in her chest, a force beyond the guilt and the fear. It was like she’d been living in a cartoon, in two dimensions, her whole life, and had just fought free of the page.
He did, barely making the turn, and rolled to a stop. “Most people think of spring break, they think bikinis, virgin piña coladas, spray tans . . .”
“Not me,” Gemma said, trying to make a joke of it. “I’m allergic to coconut. And I don’t even own a bikini.”
“Why not?” His eyes were very clear when he turned to look at her. “You’d look great in a bikini.”
Once again, she couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of her. There was an awkward second when Gemma was acutely aware that she was imagining Pete imagining her in a bikini, fat rolls and thighs that rubbed together and everything. She wanted to die of embarrassment. Her cheeks felt like someone had put a torch to them. She could hardly stand to look at him, but she had to know whether he was smirking.
He wasn’t. He was fiddling nervously with the radio, even though he’d shut off the car ignition. It occurred to Gemma that he was nervous—actually nervous. Because of her.
Germ Ives. The Frankenstein monster.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, and opened the car door. She didn’t know where all the tension had come from, but she was desperate to escape it. Her whole body was torch-hot now. Immediately, the faint scent of burning reached her, and beneath it, the smell of swampland—sunbaked mud and belly-up fish and microorganisms wiggling deep in the earth. “Thanks for the ride. Really.”
“You are serious,” he said, as though he couldn’t believe it. He raised his hands. “All right. Whatever gets your goat.”
“Whatever gets your goat?” She shook her head, amazed.
“Yeah. You know. Whatever wets your whistle, gets your rocks off, brings you to your happy place—”
“Pete?” she said. But she couldn’t help but smile. “Know when to stop. Seriously.”
She got out of the car, half expecting him to call her back. But he popped the trunk when she rapped on it and she slung her backpack over her shoulder, still with that weird sense of guilt and fear arm-wrestling with excitement in her stomach. Pete rolled down the window and called out to her before she could walk away.
“You’ll call me, right? If you need anything?”
“Is this your fancy way of getting my number?” Gemma asked. Immediately she wanted to chew her own lips off. She sounded like such a dork. And she hated herself for caring, too. He’d given her a ride and that was it. It wasn’t like they’d been on a date.
“Technically,” he said, “it’s my fancy way of making you ask for my number.” He smiled at her all crookedly, with his hair standing up as if it was happy, too. She took his number down and he took hers. “Promise you’ll call, all right? So I know you didn’t end up, you know, eaten by a crocodile or something?”
She promised she would, although she knew she wouldn’t—besides, he was just being polite. She stood there and waved good-bye, feeling a quick squeeze of regret as Pete bumped off onto the road in his ridiculous van. If she was honest, she had to admit she hadn’t hated hanging out with him. He was annoying, obviously. She didn’t like the way that he looked at her sometimes, as if his eyes were lasers boring straight into her brain. But he was funny, and he was company, and he was, okay, maybe-kind-of cute. She’d never even been alone with a boy before today.
Now she was definitely alone.
She turned back toward the marina. As soon as she began walking, she regretted telling Pete to drop her off so far away. She couldn’t approach the marina head on. She had no desire for face time with RoboCop and his buddy. But she figured if she could find a different route onto the beach, she could make her way back along the water to the place where everyone had gathered. Then, she hoped, she’d be able to figure out what had happened at Haven—what Haven was, even.
When she could hear the noise of the protest, she turned left and cut through a rutted, salt-worn alley between two boat shops, and then right on a street parallel to the one that led to the marina. Beach grass grew between cracks of the asphalt and a fine layer of sand coated the sidewalks. The houses here were interspersed with smoke shops and dingy bodegas, each of them painted a different pastel but also dusty and dim-looking, like old photographs leached of their luster. After another minute, the buildings fell back and she saw the water flashing behind saw grass the color of spun caramel. A chain-link fence blocked passage down to the beach, and beyond it she saw rusted kayaks piled in the g
rass and a scattering of broken beer bottles and cigarettes. She looked behind her: no movement in any of the houses, no signs of life at all except for a skinny cat slinking out from underneath an old Toyota Corolla. Several more helicopters motored by overhead.
She removed her backpack and heaved it over the fence, and then, checking once again to make sure no one was looking, interlaced her fingers in the chain-link and began to climb. The fence swayed dangerously and she had a momentary vision of toppling backward and pulling the whole fence with her. She maneuvered clumsily over the top of the fence and then dropped to the sand, breathing hard now and sweating under the strange smoky sun. She picked up her backpack, realizing as she did that she could now see Spruce Island in the distance—or at least, what she thought must be Spruce Island. About a mile up the coast she could make out a range of heavy dark growth above the horizon. The rest of the island, and whatever Haven was or had been, was blurred by a scrim of smoke and heat.
She picked her way along this untended portion of beach back toward the marina, watching her feet so she didn’t trip on any of the junk embedded in the sand. She came to another chain-link fence, this one running down into the water, but luckily found a gate unlatched and didn’t have to climb again. Then she was in front of a battered gray warehouse. She’d seen it at an angle from Pete’s car and knew that it extended like a long arm to brace one side of the marina.
And now the swell of voices reached her over the wind. She had to slosh down into the mud to get around the old warehouse, and every time she stepped, a few inches of filthy water swirled up around her shoes. On the far side of the warehouse was the parking lot the police had blocked off, and the crowd had assembled there, some people carrying signs and chanting in unison, some camped out on the asphalt with picnic blankets and binoculars, like they were at a summer concert. A few kids Gemma’s age or slightly older were grouped along the edge of a neighboring roof, legs dangling like icicles from the eaves, watching the action. Gemma counted fifty people and at least a dozen cops. What was going on at Haven that it would be so worth protecting? Or destroying?
She slipped unnoticed into the crowd.
She passed a man wearing a plastic Viking helmet that had been outfitted with different antennae and metal coils. He kept pacing in circles, gesturing to an invisible audience and muttering, and when he caught Gemma looking, he whirled on her and continued his monologue even more loudly “—and why we couldn’t drink any of the water when we were stationed in Nasiriyah, fear of poison, of course some must have gone in the food supply and that’s why the doctor says holes in my brain—”
She turned quickly away. Several people wore gas masks that made them look like the bad guys in a horror film, or like enormous insects, which made it even weirder that they were standing around in jeans and beat-up Top-Siders, gazing out over the water. The protesters, she saw, were calling for Haven’s shuttering. Our Land, Our Health, Our Right, read one sign, and another said, Keep Your Chemicals Out of My Backyard. But among them were signs with other, stranger messages: signs that referenced Roswell and Big Brother and zombies, and several posters screaming about the dangers of hell. One girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve was holding a colorful handmade sign with bubbly letters: And Cast Ye the Unprofitable Servant into Outer Darkness.
Gemma picked out a sunburned middle-aged couple who looked normal enough and fought her way over to them. The man wore leather sandals and a baseball hat with the logo of a hunting lodge on it. The woman was wearing a fanny pack. Both of them were staring out toward the billowing clouds of smoke in the distance, which made it look as if a volcano had erupted mid-ocean.
“What’s going on?” Gemma asked them. It was funny how disasters made friends of everyone. “Is anyone saying how the fire started?”
The man shook his head. “Nothing official. Heard maybe a gas line blew up. Of course the island’s loaded with chemicals, would have caught fast—”
His wife snorted. “It was no gas line,” she said. “We’ve talked to a dozen locals say they heard at least two explosions, one right after another.”
“Explosions,” Gemma repeated, shifting the backpack strap on her shoulder. Sweat had gathered under the collar of her shirt. “Like a bomb or something?”
The woman gave Gemma a pitying look. “You’re not from around here, are you? People have been calling for the institute or whatever it is to be shut down for years now. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to take a shortcut. Of course the rumors . . .” She spread her hands.
“What kind of rumors?” Gemma pressed, although she remembered from the Haven Files a long list of all the different things supposedly manufactured at Haven—everything from incredibly contagious diseases to human organs.
“Some people think they got aliens out there on that island,” the husband said. Now Gemma understood the reference to Roswell, where an alien spaceship had supposedly crashed and then been concealed by the military. “Well, I tell you, we come up every year from Orlando to do a little paddling and bird-watching in the reserve. Great birds up here—white ibis, knots, and dowitchers on the old oyster bars. You interested in birds?” Gemma arranged her face into what she hoped was a polite expression and nodded. He harrumphed as if he didn’t believe it and went on, “I’ve got a pair of binoculars can spot a pine grosbeak at a distance of eight hundred yards, and I’ve done a little sighting of the island and never seen any glowing green men.” He kept his eyes on the fire in the distance. “But I’ll tell you they have guards in mounted towers, barbed-wire fences sixteen feet high. They’ll shoot you if you get too close and won’t blink about it. They say they’re doing medical research out there, stuff for our boys overseas, but I don’t buy it. They’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”
Another chopper went by overhead, and Gem felt the staccato of its giant rotor all the way in her chest. It seemed obvious that no one knew what was happening or had happened out in Haven, but still she fought through the crowd, searching for an official, for someone in charge. Forcing her way through the knot of protesters, she saw a policeman arguing with a dark-haired boy with the kind of symmetrical good looks that Gemma associated with movies about superheroes. The cop was holding a professional-looking camera and appeared to be deleting pictures.
“. . . no right to confiscate it,” the boy was saying, as Gemma approached. “That’s private property.”
“What did I say about taking pictures?” the cop said, angling away and blocking the boy with a shoulder when he tried to reach for his camera. “This isn’t the goddamn Grand Canyon. We’ve got an emergency on our hands. Show some respect.”
Gemma couldn’t help but feel sorry for the boy. He looked furious. He couldn’t have been much older than she was, and the camera looked expensive. “I’m not a tourist,” he said. “And I can take pictures if I want to. This is America.”
“This is a crime scene, at least until we say otherwise,” the cop said.
The boy clenched his fists. Gemma found herself momentarily frozen, watching him. For a second his eyes ticked to hers, but they swept away just as quickly. She wasn’t offended. She was used to being invisible to other people, preferred it, even.
“All right.” The cop had finished with the camera. He popped open the back of the camera, removed the battery, and then returned the now-useless camera to Jake. “Now for your phone, please.”
“You can’t be serious.” The boy had gone completely white. Gemma was getting angry on his behalf. Why wouldn’t he have the right to take pictures if he wanted to?
The cop was obviously losing patience. He raised a finger and jabbed it right in the boy’s face. “Now look here, son—”
“My name is Jake,” the boy said smoothly. “Jake Witz.”
“All right, Jake Witz. You want to make trouble, you just keep on yapping. But I’ll bring you down to the station—”
“For what? Having an iPhone?”
“That mouth is gonna get you into
trouble. . . .”
Gemma was too stunned to move. Jake Witz was the name of the guy who ran the Haven Files website. It had to be a coincidence—he bore no resemblance to the guy in the profile picture on the site. This guy looked like he could be a Clark Kent body double, just without the glasses.
And yet . . . When she looked closer, she thought she saw certain similarities. The line of the boy’s jaw, which in the older man had been blurred. The same slightly-too-large nose, which on the boy looked strong and perfect and on the older man had just looked comical. Relatives, then? She couldn’t be sure.
Finally the boy had no choice but to pass over his phone. The cop made Jake unlock the screen, and then sorted through the pictures, deleting the ones he deemed inappropriate. Jake stood there, his face hard with anger, which somehow made him even more attractive.
Finally the cop returned the phone and gave Jake a big thump on the back, as if they were best friends at a baseball game. “Good man,” he said. “Now don’t make me ask you again, all right? Clear on out of here. Nothing to see.”
Almost immediately, the cop swaggered away, pushing roughly past Gemma without sparing her a second glance, this time to yell at two teenage girls who were trying to record a video with their phones. Jake aimed a kick at a crushed Coca-Cola can, which skittered across the sand and gravel and landed in a patch of grass. Either he hadn’t noticed Gemma or he was pretending not to have.
So she cleared her throat. “Jake? Jake Witz?”
He looked up finally and her heart stuttered. His eyes were large and dark and mournful, and reminded her of the way Rufus looked when no one was paying him any attention.
“Yeah?” he said. He sounded tired. He looked tired, too, and she wondered how long he’d been out here, watching.
“My name’s Gemma Ives,” she said. She realized she hadn’t exactly planned what she was going to say. She still didn’t know what connection this Jake Witz had to the guy who ran the Haven Files, or whether there was a connection. If he recognized her last name, he gave no indication of it. “I know you. Well, I know of you. You’re from the Haven Files, right?”