“What the hell is going on?” was all I could say.
My answer came quickly. The fighter jets opened fire on the shadows.
“It’s a dogfight!” Tori screamed.
The fighter jets started launching missiles that blasted from beneath their wings and tore into the formation of shadows. Several were hit and exploded in the air, erupting into spectacular fireballs similar to the one we had seen near Tori’s house. Some splashed into the ocean; others crashed and erupted on land.
Another four fighter jets arrived and bore into the fight. They swooped in and out in an aerial ballet that would have been fascinating to watch if it had been some CGI movie.
When the fighter jets arrived, we got more of a perspective on the shadows. They weren’t dinner-sized plates at all. They were nearly as large as the fighter planes—plenty big enough to be carrying a pilot or two. Or a load of the Ruby.
I grabbed the walkie and yelled to Quinn, “We gotta go. Crank the engine again.”
We waited, glued to the aerial battle that was playing out over Portland, Maine.
“No good,” Quinn called back. “It’s starting to smoke and—no! I’ve got a fire!”
Tori grabbed the walkie and shouted, “There’s an extinguisher aft of the wheelhouse.”
I was torn between worrying about Quinn and the impossible air war. As we floated halfway between Pemberwick Island and the mainland, we had no idea who was attacking and who was defending or who was who, for that matter. The fighters were all about taking out the shadow craft, but there was no way to know what the strange shadows were or what they were doing. After what we’d seen from the military on Pemberwick, I wasn’t so sure who were the good guys and who were the bad guys.
Up until that moment, the shadow craft were being shot out of the sky without putting up a fight.
That didn’t last.
A laser-like white light streaked from three of the shadow craft at the exact same moment. All were focused on a fighter. The three lights hit the jet—and the plane vanished.
There was no explosion. No flash of light. No fire. No sound. The plane glowed for an instant and disappeared.
I fell to my knees on the deck, realizing that I had just once again witnessed death…along with a deadly technology unlike anything I had ever heard of.
“Did you see that?” Quinn screamed over the walkie.
I think I was in shock. I couldn’t move, or think. I kept staring at the mainland and saw the same scene play over and over. Three shadow craft would target a fighter, hit it with multiple streaks of light, and the fighter would disappear. One by one the fighters were being picked off. They continued to do damage, splashing several of the shadow craft with their missiles, but it was clear that it would only be a matter of time before every last fighter was evaporated.
Tori’s head was clearer than mine. She went for the boat’s ship-to-shore radio—the same radio we didn’t dare use in case we would give away our position. That fear had been replaced by a much greater one. She flipped on the power and the radio hummed to life.
“Who are you trying to call?” I asked.
“Nobody. Somebody might be on the air to say what’s going on.”
She spun through the frequencies, searching for a call. A voice. Anything. What we got back was a garble of static and confusion. Multiple voices seemed to be screaming over one another. It was such a mess that nothing understandable came through.
It was the same with every other frequency. All we could hear, loud and clear, was something horrifyingly unmistakable—the frantic sounds of panic.
Tori gave me a grave look. “Are we at war?” she asked.
“Who is ‘we’? And who would we be at war with?”
“I can’t find the extinguisher,” Quinn yelled over the walkie. “The fire’s spreading.”
I forced myself to focus. “We gotta get him. Jeez, we’ve already waited too long.”
“We’re coming,” Tori shouted at the walkie. “What’s your position?”
“I don’t know!” Quinn called back. “Somewhere south of you.”
“There!” I yelled. I saw a faint flicker of light on the water that had to be the fire. “Let’s go!”
Tori hit the throttles, the engines roared, and we were on our way. All thoughts of stealth were gone. What we were witnessing over the mainland made the quarantine of Pemberwick Island seem trivial.
As we roared closer to the burning boat that held Quinn, I kept staring at the sky over the far shore. There were only two fighters left. Each launched missiles that took out a shadow craft, but there were too many of the mysterious planes. Unless the fighters flew off, they wouldn’t be in the air much longer. They wouldn’t be anywhere for much longer.
Tori screamed.
I spun to look ahead of us to see a massive black creature rising up out of the water between us and Quinn’s boat. The light from the boat fire was soon blocked as the enormous black shape rose up like some monster from the deep—and kept coming.
“Turn!” I bellowed and grabbed the wheel.
Together we spun it hard and fishtailed into a turn to starboard without easing back on the throttles. I didn’t know what it was in front of us. I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was avoid hitting it.
“Guys! Get me outta here!” Quinn shouted over the walkie.
I heard the desperation in his voice, and it terrified me—even more so than the rising monster. Tori got her wits back and kept control of the boat. We spun clear of the leviathan until we could once again see Quinn’s boat.
The wheelhouse was ablaze. Quinn stood on the stern, waving his arms.
That’s when I heard the music return.
Tori and I looked up to see several of the flying black craft headed our way.
“We’re coming!” I shouted into the walkie.
“I’m bailing out before this thing explodes,” Quinn shouted back.
“Go,” I yelled. “We’ll pick you up and—”
Three white laser streaks flashed out of the sky. All were focused on the Patricia.
“Jump!” I screamed into the walkie. “Get off the boat!”
The last image I saw of Quinn Carr was him stepping up onto the deck rail to jump into the water…too late.
The beams hit the boat, there was a quick burst of light, and then it was gone. The fire. The boat. Quinn.
Tori pulled back on the throttles. There was no longer a need to hurry.
“My God,” was all she managed to say.
We stood there watching the dark sea where the Patricia had once been. I kept expecting to see it reappear. Or to hear Quinn’s voice over the walkie. Neither of those things happened.
“No,” I said numbly. “No, no, no!”
I grabbed the walkie and screamed, “Quinn! Come in! Quinn!”
I was so out of my mind I don’t think I was even pressing the talk button. It didn’t matter anyway. We were close enough to the spot where the boat had been that Quinn would have heard my screams even without the walkie-talkie. I threw the walkie to the deck and leaned out over the rail.
“Quinn!” I cried. To nothing.
Tori came up behind me and held my arms.
“He can’t hear you,” she said, crying.
“Yes, he can,” I shouted. “He could be in the water. He could be out there.”
There was a rumbling, and then a sharp whoosh sound that came from our left. I barely had the will to look and see what it could be. I was aware of two eruptions coming from underwater, followed by a roar and the sight of two streaking cylinders. Missiles. They flashed into the sky toward the flying shadows that had targeted Quinn.
They found their mark. Two of the flying shadows exploded above us and crashed into the sea not fifty yards from where we were floating. The third escaped.
That solved the mystery of the rising leviathan. We were hit with a bright searchlight. I didn’t even bother to raise my hand to shield my eyes.
“Attention,”
came an amplified voice. “Are you armed?”
Armed? We had just witnessed an aerial war using unheard-of weapons and this guy wanted to know if a couple of kids in a lobster boat were armed?
Tori was more together than I was. She grabbed the shotgun and threw it over the side.
“Prepare to be boarded,” came the voice.
The dark, massive shape that had risen up before us loomed closer and I now saw it for what it was. It was a conning tower. The giant sea beast was a submarine. Painted boldly beneath the bridge was a logo.
SYLO.
My best friend was dead. His adventure was over.
But ours was only beginning.
EIGHTEEN
My head hurt.
That was the first conscious thought I’d had since staring up at the giant SYLO logo on the side of the submarine. After that, everything had gone black. What had happened? Had I been shot? Knocked out? Drugged? Or was I dead? Dead probably wasn’t an option. Not that I had any experience with the afterlife, but I didn’t think being dead involved having a pounding headache.
I opened my eyes, I think. It was hard to tell because it was dark. I was lying on a thin mattress that didn’t do much to cushion the hard floor. A quick check of my body showed no injuries. The only thing that hurt was my head.
And my heart.
Quinn was dead. It was hard to imagine, let alone accept.
His last moments were the ones that kept playing in my head. It was like a horror movie on an endless loop. Three converging streaks of light hit the Patricia and…did what? Vaporized it along with my best friend? There was no sound. No explosion. No cry of surprise or agony. One second the boat was there, the next it wasn’t. It simply disappeared—along with Quinn. I couldn’t even kick my brain into searching for explanations. All I could do was dwell on the fact that Quinn was gone. He had made a selfless decision to fly solo. If he hadn’t, all three of us might be dead. The attack could just as easily have been directed at the Tori Tickle.
Could I have saved him? What if I had gone with him instead of Tori? Could I have gotten the engine started and put the fire out? If I had been there, we might have been under way and out of there before the shadow planes arrived. But I wasn’t there. I was on the other boat. The second Quinn put out the SOS about the fire, we should have gone for him. But we didn’t. Tori asked me to. I remembered that. But I was too caught up with the light show over the mainland to worry about a little thing like my best friend needing me. What if I had been just a little more selfless? Would he still be around? I’d have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life.
Quinn had always talked about one day leaving the island to do something important, something that would be remembered. As far as I was concerned, he had done just that. He had saved our lives—and sacrificed his own to do it.
“Tori?” I called out.
All I got back was the sound of my own voice. It seemed as though I was in a small room on land. That much I figured because there was no rocking motion. I reached out and banged my knuckles into a wall. Fighting the kettledrum-like pounding between my ears, I managed to sit up and lean my back against the solid surface.
“Hey,” I yelled. “I’m awake.”
Soon after, a bright light flashed on, blinding me. Squinting against its glow, I looked to see the silhouette of someone standing ten feet away.
“How are you feeling?” the silhouette asked.
I was feeling horrible and hearing that voice made me feel even worse.
It was Granger.
“Where am I?”
“In the SYLO compound,” was his simple answer.
“Why am I hurting?”
“You were tranquilized,” he said matter-of-factly. “The discomfort will pass.”
Discomfort? That was a nice way of describing a pain that felt like I was being thumped by a sledgehammer…not to mention the anguish over having lost my best friend.
“Where is Tori Sleeper?” I asked.
“In the same situation as you,” was his reply.
“What situation is that?”
“That is what I would like to know,” he said. “Why were you out on the water?”
“I want to talk to my parents.”
“You will first answer my questions. Why were you out on the water?”
“To get away from here,” I shouted angrily. “And from you. Why else?”
“To what purpose?” he asked, emotionless.
“Purpose?” I repeated, incredulous. “We’re prisoners and you’re the warden. I saw you hunt down and kill people. How many others did you take out? Why? To contain some mysterious virus that doesn’t even exist? And you killed my best friend. The only thing he did wrong was look for the truth.”
My tirade had no impact on Granger. He glanced down at a tablet computer he was holding and said, “You are familiar with Kent Berringer?”
“Why?”
“What is your relationship to him?”
“We’re on the same football team. What’s the big deal?”
Granger stepped forward into a light that allowed me to see his face. His cold eyes were locked on me. There was no humor or sympathy coming from this guy.
“How long have you known him?”
“I don’t know. A while. My father works for his family. Why are you asking? Is he okay?”
Granger looked back down to his tablet.
“Tell me about the man known as Feit,” he said coolly.
“No!” I shouted and struggled to get to my feet. “First you tell me what the hell is happening here. I just saw a war in the sky and whatever was flying around up there killed Quinn with a weapon like I never knew existed. Why don’t you tell me. Who are you? What is SYLO? And what is really happening on Pemberwick?”
Granger stared at his tablet as if he hadn’t heard a word I’d said.
“You sampled a substance you call the Ruby, is that correct?”
I started walking toward Granger.
“Do my parents work with you? Do they know what’s going on here? Do Quinn’s parents? Do they know that he’s dead because of you? Who gets to tell them? I hope it’s you.”
I charged toward Granger. It was idiotic, but I was out of my mind. To me, he was responsible for the entire nightmare that had gripped my home and killed my friend. I wanted to hit him. Maybe wrap my hands around his throat and squeeze until he told me the truth. I wanted to see fear in his cold eyes. I suppose I should have realized how foolish a move that was, especially because he stayed focused on his tablet and didn’t even brace to protect himself. When he didn’t react, I had a fleeting thought that my move was a complete surprise and that I might actually have a chance against him.
The thought ended abruptly when I ran full speed into a hard, clear surface. I slammed my shoulder and was knocked backward. For my effort I was rewarded with a sore shoulder to go along with my aching head.
Granger was standing on the opposite side of protective glass. He looked down at me over his tablet with no sympathy.
“You will be moved to more comfortable quarters,” he said, simply stating fact. “I trust that you will control your impulses or you will find yourself back in here. Alone.”
“You killed him!” I shouted. I was trying to hold back tears but it was a losing battle. “He was a good guy. He got nothing but straight As in school. He read every book he could get his hands on and he liked every one of them. He was the smartest guy I know. He made me laugh. And now he’s dead. Why? Why are people dying? What are you doing here?”
Granger stared at me with no emotion as I blathered on.
“We’ll talk again when you are in control of yourself,” he said. The light behind him went out and the room went black.
I slid down to the floor, crying and gasping for breath.
“Granger!” I screamed for no better reason than to let out my frustration.
I was back in the dark, in every way. I’ve heard about people “hitting bottom” an
d hoped I’d never have the experience. Lying there hurting, having lost my best friend and everything else to do with my life made me think the bottom was actually being hit because I couldn’t imagine anything lower.
I sat there for a few minutes, crying. Why not? I didn’t care who was watching or what they thought about me. I guess that’s what happens on the bottom. Once I let my emotions take over, my sorrow and self-pity were slowly replaced by another more powerful emotion. Anger. These people had come to my island and taken over our lives. What did any of us do to deserve that? Nothing. We were victims. We all were. Yet Quinn was executed. Yeah, I’ll use that word. Executed. We were in a war. We didn’t ask for it, yet we were in the middle of it. But who were we fighting? SYLO? That was just the Navy. The military needs orders and a mission. Did that come from Granger? He was calling the shots but it was dumb to think that he was solely responsible for the nightmare. He was taking orders too. But from whom? He had the backing of the president of the United States. Richard E. Neff. Was he the villain here? That was too much to get my head around. I had to stay focused on what I knew, and what I knew was Granger. He may not have been acting alone but he was in charge. Granger was the enemy.
That was something I could understand.
As I sat on the floor in that dark room, lost in rage and confusion and sorrow, I made a decision. I couldn’t just wish for the trouble to go away and for my life to return to normal. I couldn’t hope that my parents would tell me the truth and it would all make sense and somehow go away. That wasn’t going to happen…unless I made it happen. We were in a war. I had made a decision. I was going to fight. For me, for my old life, and for my best friend.
I promised myself that someday, somehow, Granger would pay for Quinn’s death. I owed my friend that much.
I don’t know how long I sat there in the dark. A couple of minutes? An hour? It was long enough to get back some control. I couldn’t let my emotions rule my actions. I had to be as cold as Granger. Every move I made had to be calculated while taking one step at a time—and I knew what that first step had to be….