“How did you know to do that?” I asked.
“Because I’m smart,” Jon replied. “What’s your story?”
“We were on Pemberwick Island,” Kent replied curtly. “Now we’re not. End of story.”
He didn’t have the energy to relive all the details of what we had been through, and I didn’t blame him.
Jon stopped short and turned back to face us. The beam from his headlight burned into our eyes.
“Get that outta my face!” Kent complained.
“You were on Pemberwick?” Jon asked in awe.
“There’s no virus, if that’s what you’re worried about,” I assured him.
“I’m not,” Jon said. “I never thought there was. It made no sense. How did you get away?”
“Speedboat,” was my simple answer.
Jon nodded thoughtfully. “That explains a lot.”
“What do you mean?” Kent asked.
Jon turned abruptly and continued to walk.
“About your friend being shot,” he answered quickly. “That was a hell of a battle out there on the water.”
His reaction to our being from Pemberwick was an odd one, mostly because he didn’t press us for more information. You’d think he would have been a little more interested, but Jon was definitely more about Jon than anybody else. He brought us to the cafeteria without another word and led us into the big, institutional kitchen.
“There are fruits and vegetables in the walk-in cooler. Open and close the door quickly. We’re trying to keep the cold in for as long as possible.”
He tossed me a flashlight, and Kent and Tori followed me into the big cooler. Inside we gathered tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, bananas, and a half dozen apples. All were still fresh, but there was no telling how long that would last. We also grabbed a loaf of bread that didn’t look as though any mold had grown on it. Yet. We brought it all outside, spread it on a counter, and made sandwiches.
“Is it okay for us to take this much?” I asked Jon. “How many survivors are in the hospital?”
“Including me and Dr. Kayamori?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Two.”
“You know you’re kind of annoying, right?” Kent said.
“That’s it?” Olivia asked with surprise. “There are only two survivors in the whole hospital?”
“Why is that a shock?” Jon asked. “People weren’t injured in the attack, they were obliterated. Dr. Kayamori wanted to stay here in case people showed up and . . . surprise. Here you are.”
“And why are you staying here?” Kent asked.
“Why not?” Jon said with a shrug. “There’s nowhere else to go.”
That was a conversation killer.
We finished making a load of tomato and lettuce sandwiches and stacked them on a bus tray along with the apples and overripe bananas. I grabbed a few bottles of water from next to the silent cash register, and we all headed back to the ER.
When we arrived, the doctor was finishing the tape job on Tori’s new, clean bandage.
“She was incredibly lucky,” Luna said.
“I was just lucky,” Tori said. “If I was incredibly lucky, the sniper would have missed completely.”
“The entrance and exit wounds are clean. Seems as though the bullet passed through without bouncing around inside. If it had, you’d probably be dead. As it is, you’ll be feeling some pain while the muscle heals.”
She looked to us and added, “I packed the wound with cotton to allow it to heal from the inside. It’ll have to be changed every day or so for a while. I gave her a tetanus shot and some antibiotic tablets. Multiple vitamins too. There isn’t anything more I would do even if the hospital were fully functional.”
She touched Tori on the shoulder and said, “It will be painful for a few weeks, but you should be feeling better soon after that.”
“Thanks, Dr. Kayamori,” Tori said.
“Luna, and you are very welcome. I’m just happy I was here to help. It’s odd to be the only doctor in a war zone and not have any patients.”
We all sat at the nurses’ station and chowed on the sandwiches. I would have preferred a big old hamburger, but you can’t cook a burger without gas or electricity . . . or meat. Luna placed her battery-powered lantern on the counter, and we sat huddled together in its light, enjoying the simple meal.
“Do you have any idea what happened?” I asked Luna.
“Not a clue. It was about as normal a day as you could imagine. The only interesting news going on was about Pemberwick Island. But after a few weeks even that was no longer big news.”
“Unless you were there,” Kent groused.
Luna continued, “I was working alone in my office when we heard the first screams. Then the power went out. Jon came running in and ordered me to go to the basement with him. I was too confused to do anything but follow.”
“Why her?” Kent asked Jon. “Was she the best doctor here, or just the hottest?”
“Jeez, Kent,” Tori scolded.
Kent shrugged. “Just trying to get the picture.”
Jon replied, “I’d like to say that I was thinking clearly enough to make those kinds of judgment calls, but the truth is that I had just delivered a load of paper products to the nurses’ station next to her office. Dr. Kayamori was the first doctor I saw when the attack began.”
“And she’s hot,” Kent added.
Jon looked embarrassed, and Luna bailed him out.
“It was my good fortune he was there, because he saved my life. We stayed in the basement for a few hours before deciding that whatever had happened was over. It took us quite some time to make our way back up in the dark, and when we finally surfaced, the hospital was empty. Jon and I left to seek help, but, well, you know what we found. We came back and have stayed here ever since.”
“It’s like they swept the city with that laser weapon,” I said. “It even got to people who were indoors.”
“Unless they were deep below ground,” Jon corrected. “We’ve met other survivors too. We think that weapon only works at night, but a few planes have been around during the day using other weapons. We’ve heard explosions. It’s like they’re trying to finish the job. We don’t see them much anymore, though. Maybe they think they got us all.”
“The idea that so many people died in such a short time is hard to comprehend,” Luna said. “Who could be behind such an evil act?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said quickly.
We gave Luna and Jon a brief overview of what we had been through on Pemberwick: the Ruby, the bogus quarantine, the SYLO troops from the U.S. Navy who were holding us prisoner, and the discovery that the black attack planes had the logo of the U.S. Air Force.
“No way!” Jon blurted out. He had been fidgeting during the entire story, dying to add his own opinions. He held himself back until I said that Portland had been attacked by the U.S. Air Force. That pushed him over the edge.
“That’s just crazy. Why would the Navy be fighting the Air Force?”
“Current theory? Civil War II,” Kent said casually while licking tomato pulp from his fingers.
“It’s a horrifying thought,” Luna said soberly. “If it’s true, then it would follow that Portland isn’t the only battleground.”
“That’s what we’re afraid of,” I agreed. “But if the United States is busy trying to destroy itself, you’d think that other countries would step in to try to stop it.”
“Unless they don’t want to get attacked themselves,” Tori offered.
“Or unless they want us to wipe ourselves out first,” Kent said.
Jon suddenly sat bolt upright and looked at his watch.
“It’s time!” he said and took off running into the dark.
“Time for what?” Tori asked.
“For the last two days, we’ve been picking up a radio broadcast,” Luna explained. “It’s the voice of a woman, but the signal is very weak, so it’s hard to understand.”
“We heard it,” I said.
“The transmission lasts for two minutes and happens every other hour on the hour. Jon has been trying to decipher it.”
“I’d like to hear it again,” I said.
Luna grabbed the battery-powered lantern and headed after Jon. We followed her back down the hallway to the small office that held the ER’s radio.
Jon was inside, already having powered up the device. He was listening intently to the static while delicately moving his finger across the touchscreen, searching for a signal.
Kent asked, “Who do you think—”
“Shhh!” Jon snapped.
After hearing nothing for several seconds, I was ready to give up and go back to my sandwich . . . when the voice came through.
“. . . survivors . . . beaten . . . attacked . . . you safe . . . north . . . thirty-six degrees . . . twenty seconds . . . west one hundred . . . thirty-one minutes . . . repel . . . invaders . . . strength . . . not hesitate . . .”
“It’s making me crazy,” Jon complained. “I have no idea what she’s saying.”
“It’s the same message every two hours,” Luna added. “We think it’s a recording.”
“Could it be somebody on a ham radio?” Tori asked.
“No,” Jon said quickly. “They’re broadcasting on an emergency frequency. It’s the one used by ambulances to communicate with hospitals.”
“So there could be other hospitals hearing this right now?” I asked.
“If they still exist,” Jon said. “And they’re smart enough to be listening.”
“It can’t be SYLO, or the Air Force,” I said. “Their equipment is, like, high tech.”
“We must be listening to other survivors,” Tori said. “This could be a call for help.”
“Then they’re calling the wrong people,” Kent said, scoffing.
Tori grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down some of the disjointed words.
“Thirty-six degrees,” she said while writing furiously. “That could be a coordinate. But without the whole thing, there’s no way of knowing where it is.”
The woman’s voice abruptly stopped, leaving nothing but static coming from the speakers.
Jon glanced at his watch.
“Two minutes on the dot,” he announced. “She’ll be back in another two hours.”
“Somebody is trying to reach out,” Tori declared.
“Reach out to do what?” Olivia asked.
“I don’t know,” Tori said. “Maybe to find other survivors?”
“So why don’t we talk back?” Kent asked.
“I tried,” Jon explained. “There’s no response. It’s another reason why I think it’s a recording.”
“Well, this is all very interesting,” Kent said, sounding bored. “But if we don’t know who it is, why they’re broadcasting, where they are, or what they want, why are we so interested?”
Tori said, “Because they may know why we’re at war.”
Jon powered down the radio, and the room went silent.
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote something quickly. “Luna, don’t doctors have to study Latin?”
“A bit,” she replied. “I took more courses as an undergraduate, though. I thought it would help in medical school. It didn’t.”
“Do you have any idea what this says?” I asked. “I’m not sure if I remember the exact spelling.”
I handed her the paper. On it I had written down the words that were scrawled like graffiti on the wreckage of the downed Air Force plane we discovered in the Old Port.
Luna held it closer to the lantern and read it aloud. “Sequentia yconomus libertate te ex inferis obendienter.”
“SYLO,” Tori said.
Luna frowned. “I’m not a Latin scholar by any stretch of the imagination.”
“Does it make any sense?” I asked.
“Sequentia could mean ‘sequence.’ Or something that follows. I’m not familiar with yconomus. Obendienter could be the root of the word ‘obedient.’”
“What about libertate te ex inferis?” I asked.
Luna gave me a dark look. She asked, “Do you really think this phrase has something to do with SYLO?”
“Either that, or it’s an incredible coincidence that it’s a perfect acronym,” I said.
“Do you know what it means?” Tori asked.
Luna took a breath. She said, “Libertate means ‘to liberate or free something.’”
“What about te ex inferis?”
She handed the paper back to me. “I can only offer a loose translation, but to the best of my knowledge, libertate te ex inferis means ‘to liberate, or to save a person, from the gates of hell.’”
Her words echoed through the empty hospital, or maybe they were echoing through my head. I finally got my thoughts together enough to say, “So we could be dealing with a deadly virus, or a powerful and lethal drug, or aliens, or a civil war, and now we’ve got to add the possibility of something biblical going on?”
Luna shrugged and said, “I don’t know. I’m not a religious person. I don’t know what happens after death or why we’re all here, but after what happened to this city, to these people, I could be convinced that evil truly does exist, because there was definitely a devil at work here, and we have found ourselves standing at the gates of hell.”
THREE
I was beyond exhausted.
It was hard to believe that less than twenty-four hours had passed since we had gone to sleep on Pemberwick Island in a tent with a group of rebels led by Tori’s father.
So much had changed in a single day.
We decided to spend the night in the hospital and figure out what our next move would be in the morning. Luna gave us hospital scrubs to sleep in. My clothes were rank, but there was no way to wash and dry them. It didn’t matter. We could visit a deserted shop in Portland and take our pick of new clothes. Nobody would care.
The best part about the night was that we got to take showers. The hospital’s plumbing system still worked, for the time being, and I was looking forward to washing away the grime that had been building up since I took my last shower in the SYLO prison camp. The girls went first, then Kent went with Jon. I thought about bailing and going to sleep, but as tired as I was, I wasn’t going to pass up the chance at a shower, so when it was my turn I forced my sorry self to go.
There was a locker room next to the showers, so I dropped my new scrubs there, peeled off my old clothes, and dumped them in the trash. The only thing I didn’t toss were my cross-trainers. I didn’t want to lose those until I found new ones. I grabbed a towel from the stack near the door and headed for the shower.
The water was still warm. That wouldn’t last. Once it ran out, there would be no way to heat it again. There was no electricity and therefore no lights. Or heat. Or refrigeration. We didn’t have cell phones or radios or Internet or any of the other things we had always taken for granted. A hot shower was a luxury that wouldn’t be repeated until we reconnected with civilization.
As I stood there, enjoying the warmth, I tried to be positive. Our goal was to get to Boston and blow the whistle on those responsible for what was happening on Pemberwick. After that, who knew? One step at a time. Thinking too far ahead made my head hurt.
When I started to fall asleep standing up, I realized I had had enough. I left the shower, went back to the locker room to get dressed, and got as far as pulling on the scrub pants when—
“Oops, sorry,” Olivia said with an embarrassed giggle.
I spun to see her standing there with her hand over her eyes.
“Didn’t see anything,” she said with a chuckle. “Much.”
“I thought you went to sleep!” I said as I quickly pulled my scrub top on.
“I couldn’t. I want to talk.”
Standing there facing her was unnerving. I felt as though I was still naked.
She put her hands on her hips and struck a pose.
“Not exactly a stylish outfit.”
>
It didn’t matter that the scrubs were so plain; she looked great. Her short blond hair was still wet. She had it combed straight back, which let her bright blue eyes sparkle in the light from the lantern.
“We’ll get new clothes tomorrow,” I said.
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. We should probably stick to the original plan and—”
“I’m scared, Tucker.”
Her voice was shaky. I was afraid she might cry.
“We all are. We’ll find your mother and get you home.”
She gave me a wistful smile and said, “Not so sure about that. I don’t think I’m ever going to see my mother again.”
“Don’t say that,” I chastised. “She probably went back to your home in New York. Or maybe she went to Boston and she’s planning on coming back here to find you.”
Olivia shrugged. She didn’t believe either of those possibilities. Her mother had left Pemberwick to go shopping on the mainland when the attack hit. Odds were that Olivia’s fear was justified.
“What about your father?” I asked.
She shrugged and smiled sadly. “He’s a long, long way from here.”
“So then we’ll get you back together with him. And your mother too.”
“Do you really believe that?” she asked innocently.
“I do,” I said.
I didn’t. I had no idea what was possible. I thought my words would comfort her, even if they were lies, but it seemed as though I was only making things worse, for tears grew in Olivia’s eyes.
“You’re such a good guy,” she said. “None of this should have happened.”
“You get no argument from me there, but it did. You’re not alone here, Olivia. We’re going to watch out for each other.”
She looked up at me with big, innocent eyes.
“Promise?”
“Cross my heart,” I said while crossing my heart.
She walked slowly toward me.
I took a step back and hit the lockers.
She came right up to me and put her arms around my neck.
I looked down into those big blue eyes. It was almost as terrifying as when we faced the black plane in the Old Port.