Extinction Game (39 page)

Rozalia started hauling the sack of rifles back out of the weeds. ‘How about you all stop showing each other your dicks and give me a hand,’ she suggested, ‘before they change
their mind and come back to use us for target practice.’

Ten minutes later we were back at the Hotel du Mauna Loa. Randall was keeping watch from the main entrance, and he pulled the door all the way open as we came towards him.

Rozalia dropped the sack on the floor and started passing out the rifles and ammunition. I saw that Randall had been busy, cutting away part of Howes’ uniform and wrapping his wounded
shoulder in gauze sourced from the bar’s first-aid kit.

‘We all ready to go?’ I asked, looking around.

People nodded, and I turned to Howes. ‘Are you sure you’re up to this? You lost some blood on the way here, and nobody’d blame you for sitting this out.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ he replied.

‘What exactly
are
you planning to do when you get there?’ Yuichi asked the Major.

Howes’ mouth curled up on one side. ‘I’m going to surrender.’

I wondered if I had misheard him. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m going to walk up to whoever’s in charge of the base, surrender, and tell them any damn pack of lies I can come up with to keep them all occupied long enough for your
friends to sneak in and, with luck, spring Kip Mayer.’

I remembered to close my mouth. ‘And that’s actually going to work?’

‘I don’t know,’ Howes replied. ‘But if they’re as dumb as I think they are, the Patriots are all going to be too busy following orders – either looking for
Vishnevsky, or guarding the transfer stages. I don’t think they’re expecting anyone to try and rescue Mayer, especially not if they’re sure he can’t get off the island any
other way.’

‘Sounds dangerous,’ I hazarded.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That’s why you’ve all got guns.’

I nodded, embarrassed.

Howes stood carefully. He was steady on his feet despite his injury. ‘Anyone with a desperate need to take a shit, do it now,’ he announced. ‘Otherwise, I think it’s time
we got moving.’

I’d been trying hard to think of some way we could maybe drive up to the shipwreck without running into any more trouble, but I kept coming up blank, particularly since
everything with four wheels had been appropriated by the Patriots. That seemed to leave the four of us little choice but to walk the whole damn way across the island and take our chances,
regardless of how long it took, or the danger of being spotted by another Patriot patrol. I explained my concerns to Rozalia as we all hustled back out of the Mauna Loa.

‘Why don’t we just go by boat?’ she suggested, once Howes and the others had slipped off in the direction of the compound.

I came to a halt, wondering how I could have been so dumb as not to think of anything so obvious. We were on an island, after all, and our destination was just a few kilometres up the coast. It
wasn’t even as if I lacked sailing experience of my own.

Yuichi and Oskar became excited at the prospect.

‘Sounds great,’ I said, ‘but where the hell are we going to find a working boat?’ All I’d seen were a few dilapidated rowing boats down by the harbour that looked
as if they’d disintegrate the moment they hit the water.

‘There’s an old Chilean Navy Coast Guard station at the harbour’s edge,’ Rozalia explained. ‘There’s a search-and-rescue dinghy in there that’s easily
big enough for all of us, and it’s in good condition as well. There’s also a slipway leading straight into the water, and nobody’ll be able to see us while we’re working
inside the station.’

‘Shit, yes,’ said Yuichi. ‘You were fixing that boat up with Nadia, said you were going to take some of us out in it some time.’

‘Well, it looks like this is the time,’ she said.

Rozalia, it turned out, was something of a sailing enthusiast, having grown up on the Florida coast. We kept our eyes open for trouble, but we reached the lifeboat station
without incident.

It proved to be a dilapidated wooden structure, with a sloping concrete slipway leading straight into the sea. We followed her inside, where I saw a twelve-foot orange and grey dinghy with an
outboard motor and a pennant reading
ARMADE DE CHILE
. Rozalia regarded it with undisguised pride.

‘I hate boats,’ Oskar grumbled. ‘Unless you’re fishing or actually going somewhere, what’s the fucking point?’

I watched Rozalia check the outboard motor. ‘Aren’t we going to attract the wrong kind of attention with all the noise from the engine?’

‘I figure the best thing is not to use it at first,’ she said, looking back at me. ‘We’ll start out with the oars, then turn the engine on once we’re far enough
from the shore that we won’t be heard.’ She chuckled. ‘I’ll bet you anything it’s never occurred to those assholes to even look out to sea.’

Oskar looked horrified. ‘Did you say we were going to
row
there?’

‘Part of the way.’ Rozalia nodded at two pairs of long wooden oars mounted on racks. ‘The water today doesn’t look too choppy, so we’ll have a relatively easy time
of it.’ She looked at us. ‘So who’s going to help me get them down?’

Oskar and Yuichi stepped forward and helped get the oars down. I leaned my rifle against a wall, then made my way down towards the prow, near where the slipway led down to the water’s
edge. The dinghy looked to have been kept in good condition.

We all followed Rozalia’s directions, gathering around either side of the dinghy, before pushing and dragging it down towards the waves. I was panting slightly from the effort by the time
it hit the water. Rozalia raced after it down the slipway, then threw herself forward and inside the dinghy, letting out a whoop as she pulled herself the rest of the way in.

The rest of us followed suit, splashing and cursing as we grabbed hold of the lip of the dinghy before it got away from us. I managed to throw myself forward and inside before clambering onto
one of its hard wooden benches. Rozalia lifted one of the oars up, expertly sliding it into a rowlock before dipping its blade into the water.

I did the same, along with Yuichi and Oskar but, it must be said, with considerably less grace than Rozalia. Soon, however, all four oars were fitted to their rowlocks, and we sat facing back
towards the harbour, the dinghy falling and rising beneath us with the tide. I could see no sign of movement beyond the harbour wall. The farther we got, the less likely we were to be seen.

‘All ready?’ asked Rozalia, looking around and clearly struggling to hide the fact she was having the time of her life. ‘Then let’s go.’

I had multiple opportunities over the next half-hour to regret my initial enthusiasm. My back ached, my butt was in agony from sitting on that hard wooden bench, and I had
incipient blisters on the palms of my hands. But at least I kept my discomfort to myself, unlike Oskar, who cursed and muttered the whole damn way, until I had serious thoughts of tossing him
overboard.

After a while, though, I got into the rhythm of the rowing and the steady beat of the oarblades as they rose and dipped, rose and dipped. Every now and then a particularly large wave lifted us
up high, before sending us crashing back down with enough force to give me butterflies in my stomach.

Rozalia, by contrast, was in her element. She was sweating, but looked happy for the first time since Nadia’s demise.

‘Okay,’ Rozalia finally gasped, pulling her oar back in after what felt like a century of rowing. ‘Stop.’

Oskar let out a long groan, dragging his oar across his lap before reaching up to wipe the sweat from his neck and face.

‘How far out are we?’ I asked, staring back towards the harbour. It didn’t look like we’d covered that much distance.

‘Farther than you think,’ she replied. ‘Wind’s blowing out to sea. The noise from the outboard won’t carry back to shore so much.’

She made her way to the rearmost bench to fiddle with the outboard engine until it let out a muted roar, its blades cutting into the ocean waters. We began to pick up speed, cutting with ease
through the water. Rozalia peered ahead, one hand on the tiller, slowly swinging the dinghy around until we were sailing parallel to the coast. First we would sail around the northern tip of the
island, and then make our way along the east coast.

The sun tracked its way across the sky towards late afternoon. I started to feel tired, the constant rocking motion lulling me. It had been a long, hard couple of days, with
barely a moment to rest. Rozalia’s hand remained steady on the tiller, her eyes fixed either directly ahead or on the coast.

The harbour passed out of sight once we had rounded the sea cliffs that formed one slope of Rano Kau. I felt myself relax a little; we were out of sight of any unwanted observers.

‘If they haven’t seen us by now,’ Rozalia murmured, as if reading my thoughts, ‘they never will.’

‘I wonder how the others are doing,’ said Yuichi. But no one answered him.

Rano Kau itself soon slipped to rearwards, and sooner than I’d anticipated Rozalia began to guide the dinghy in towards the rocky cove and the wrecked trawler. I saw it
from the sea for the first time, its upper deck leaning towards us, streaked and pitted with rust.

Up above on the headland lay the coast road where Rozalia had been arrested. Should another patrol have chosen that moment to drive by, they would have had little difficulty in seeing us. That
was unavoidable, and so we had to work fast.

Rozalia cut the engine a few metres from the water’s edge, jumping out and into the shallow water, taking hold of a short rope attached to the prow of the dinghy in order to pull it
farther up the beach.

‘Give me a hand,’ she yelled. ‘We’re going to need to get this thing out of sight.’

Soon we were all splashing about, hauling on the rope until the dinghy slid up and on to the sand. We decided to hide it directly behind the wreck itself, on the seaward site, where it
couldn’t be seen from land. I kept glancing towards the coast road, expecting to see approaching headlights, but there was nothing.

‘Okay,’ said Oskar, checking his rifle before snapping it shut and nodding to the rent in the trawler’s hull. ‘Let’s go see what’s in there.’

We followed in his wake, our feet leaving shallow impressions in the sand.

The bottom of the hull had been torn nearly in half, and gaped like a set of open jaws. I wondered under what circumstances the ship had gained such a deep and mortal wound,
and if it had had anything to do with whatever cataclysm swept away the island’s original inhabitants. The tear was easily wide and tall enough to walk right inside, just as Rozalia had
said.

I ducked down slightly as I followed Oskar into the dim interior of the beached craft and saw grey tarpaulins hanging from a cord strung from one end of the wreck to the other, like a washing
line. Oskar tugged at a tarpaulin, and it fell onto the sand, revealing a tiny transfer stage.

The stage had been crammed into the available space on top of a crude platform, constructed from yet more tarpaulins, stretched across a rough wooden framework about three metres across. Most
probably Casey and Wallace had scavenged the wood for the platform from one of the town’s many abandoned houses. I pressed my hand against it, and found to my surprise that it was a great
deal sturdier than it appeared. I saw one of the rugged laptops normally used to control the portable stages sitting to one side of a field-pillar, connected to it via a cable. Yuichi stepped
towards the laptop and tapped at its keyboard; the screen sprang to life in response.

‘Well?’ I asked. ‘Does it show the last programmed coordinates?’

Yuichi looked at me, his expression strained. ‘I don’t know why, Jerry, but he’s gone back to where Nadia got killed.’

I closed my eyes and listened to the sudden, terrified pounding of my heart.

Because the stage by necessity was so small, we had to transfer across to the bee-brain alternate in pairs, rather than all at once.

I went first, along with Yuichi, both of us with our weapons levelled in case we found Casey waiting on the other side. But once the shimmer of transition faded, I saw we were all alone.

In fact, everything looked just the same as it had the last time I had been here with Rozalia, except that it was now just before dawn, if I remembered the time-deviation between this alternate
and the island’s.

I stepped out of the stage’s perimeter and saw a drone drop slowly out of the sky and settle onto its charging station. A light on its undercarriage switched from green to red as its
central rotor fell silent.

The air smelled damp, moisture beading the grass. It must have rained sometime in the last couple of hours. The air shimmered around the stage as Rozalia and Oskar next arrived from the island.
I continued to keep my rifle at the ready, wary of any surprises. The SUV I had last ridden into the city with Rozalia was still there, along with the EV truck.

‘Casey was here no more than a few hours ago,’ said Rozalia, stepping away from the transfer stage and towards the SUV. ‘Look.’

She pointed at a square of dry grass next to the SUV, barely visible in the dim light of dawn. The jeep had been parked there and had kept the patch of grass dry from the rain. Casey had
obviously driven it into the city and not yet returned.

She stepped back, peering into the distance. ‘Guess it’s not much of a leap to assume he’s gone north, into the city.’ She looked at me. ‘Not really anywhere else
he could be going.’

Yuichi headed for the SUV. ‘Well, at least we can take this—’

‘Hang on,’ I said, stopping him with a hand on his shoulder. ‘I want to take a look at it first. Rozalia?’

She nodded, and together we crawled in and around the SUV for a solid twenty minutes, while Oskar and Yuichi watched in apparent bafflement. I couldn’t find a trace or scent of anything,
and neither could Rozalia.

‘Mind telling us just what you’re looking for?’ asked Yuichi after a couple of minutes of this. ‘You worried he might have planted a bomb on it or something?’

‘Not a bomb,’ said Rozalia. ‘Worse.’