Phoenix Island (4 page)

“Attention!” a drill sergeant yelled.

Everyone snapped to attention.

First Sergeant Oteka stood before them. “Welcome to Phoenix Island, boys and girls. I am First Sergeant Oteka. Allow me to explain the reality of your situation, children.” She walked slowly back and forth before them. When she turned, Carl saw the pistol on her belt. “Your parents are dead.”

Her words echoed in Carl’s mind.
Your parents are dead
. Was she talking to him?

“You are all orphans,” Oteka said.

All of us?
Carl thought.

“You bit the hand that fed you, and society cast you away. You are yesterday’s trash. And from this moment forward, until your eighteenth birthday, you belong to me and also to the Old Man, whom you are not yet ready to meet. I will not subject his eyes to such unwashed rabble.”

She stared at them for several seconds, surveying their faces. Gunfire rattled in the distance.

“You will have no contact with the outside world,” Oteka said. “No phone calls. No texts. No email. No letters. No news. No music, television, or internet.” She raked her hard gaze over their ranks. “The world will move on without you. No one there knows where you are, and no one cares. Phoenix Island is your only home.” She gestured toward the drill sergeants. “We are your only family.”

She spoke to the soldiers, who formed a line and stood, legs apart, chins out, hands behind their backs.

“Drill Sergeant Parker,” Oteka said. “Please demonstrate my sincerity.”

Skull-and-Crossbones offered the formation a big smile, then walked past the line of sergeants, dumping the contents of a green bag. Cell phones, MP3 players, and games clattered to the pavement.

A quiet murmur ran through the ranks.

“Isolation!” Oteka said, and her men started stomping the devices into the ground. Screens shattered; phones snapped; iPods twisted and split. Around Carl, kids gasped and groaned, hissed and whispered, scowled and wept.

For Carl, who’d never owned electronics, this destruction wasn’t of personal concern, but it was another in a sequence of danger signs. What concerned him most of all was the opening of First Sergeant Oteka’s speech:
You are all orphans.
Why had they taken only orphans? He thought of the kick he had received, the rough handling of Davis. He glanced around. Here they were, on Phoenix Island, somewhere outside of the United States and its laws.

We’re as dead to the world as our parents,
Carl thought.
These people can do anything to us.

C
ARL CLIMBED INTO THE LONG,
open flatbed of one of the cattle trucks and found himself once again next to the small kid. Oh well, maybe it was time to make a friend—even one who told horrible jokes.

The kid smiled. “You survived.”

“For now,” Carl said. He felt like he’d gone fifteen rounds against a heavyweight.

“They took my PSP.” The kid cursed and curled his small hands into talons. “Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get that thing?”

Carl shrugged. “Pretty hard, I guess.”

“Only six hours every Saturday for about a million years.” He shook his head. “I wore a chicken suit and stood at this busy intersection, waving a Chicken Hut sign.”

“Ouch,” Carl said, chuckling a little.

“Ouch isn’t the half of it. This kid Dan Carville—he worked at the pet shop next to Chicken Hut—told everybody at school, and—”

“No prom for you.”

“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. No prom for me.” The kid grinned. “I got so bored standing there in that chicken suit, I used to curse at everybody driving by. They couldn’t hear me. I’d yell the worst thing I could think of, and some dumb woman would beep and wave like it was roses. It was pretty funny.” He chuckled, but then his smile faded. “Now my PSP is in a thousand pieces.”

Carl nodded his head. “Better your video game than your ribs.”

“Sorry. It’s pretty lame, complaining about my stuff when you were getting kicked like that. You okay?”

“Yeah. I’ve been in some pretty rough places, and sometimes staff would yell, push you up against the wall, stuff like that. But this? I didn’t know they could hit us.”

The kid spread his palms. “I figure we’re somewhere in the Pacific, off the western coast of Mexico. You know why they build places like this outside the US, right? So they can do whatever they want without worrying about us suing them later. Whatever. Not much we can do about it now. My name’s Neil, by the way. Neil Ross.”

“Carl Freeman.” They shook. Ross’s hand was small and sweaty, but Carl didn’t care. At last, he had something like a friend. Here on Phoenix Island, that mattered, even if Ross looked like a bull’s-eye for the type of trouble that followed Carl everywhere he went. Bullies would eat Ross alive, and then Carl would . . .

No,
he told himself.
You have to control yourself this time.
On the journey here, he’d begun to really like the idea of having a future. For years, he’d assumed all the trouble he’d gotten into would throw a pair of cuffs on any dream he might cook up. Now things were different. Staying out of trouble, earning a clean record, becoming a cop—that would really be something.

Not that he’d done a very good job of staying out of trouble so far. But still, Phoenix Island, tough as the introduction was, was his way out.

The line of trucks started moving.

“Here we go,” Ross said. “Next stop, Hogwarts.”

Carl grinned. He had no idea what Ross was talking about, but he could tell it was a joke.

They drove into the jungle. It was amazing—true wilderness—no pavement, no buildings, only trees and plants and gloom. A rich, damp smell filled the air, different from the mossy smell of the woods back in Pennsylvania. Underneath the jungle air dwelled a faint ripeness, something like decay. Overhead, the canopy grew so dense it blocked the sun that earlier had fried them like bacon. The light was dim, the vegetation thick. Here and there, roads branched off left or right, but the truck kept going, bouncing over frequent rough patches. Once, Carl saw something
low and stubby, like a barrel with legs, running through the trees. A pit bull, maybe, or a pig. Nothing he wanted to run into, either way.

Ross said he was from Massachusetts, from some town Carl had never heard of. “Well,” Ross said, “if you ever visit, drop by the pet store and punch Dan Carville in the nose for me.”

Eventually they entered a bright clearing, where, off to the right, about a football field in the distance, something exploded. A plume of dirt and smoke rose into the air. Kids screamed in surprise and appreciation. Drill sergeants shouted, and the trucks drove once more into the darkness of the jungle.

The air grew thicker, redolent of swampy decay. The trucks skidded to a stop beside a high fence topped with razor wire. Off to the left, in a dim clearing dappled by strips of sunlight falling through breaks in the trees, stood whitewashed buildings with wooden porches and thatched roofs. A brown sign with yellow letters faced the road.

“Medical center,” Ross read aloud, but Carl said nothing. Something about the place made his stomach roll and clench.

Two kids carried the redhead who’d fainted off one of the trucks, his arms slung over their shoulders. A gate opened, and soldiers in green shirts loaded the kid onto a stretcher. He looked dead, Carl thought.

“Whoa,” Ross said. “Look.”

Between the nearest building and the fence, a figure shambled into view. His mouth hung open. One bruised eye was swollen shut; the other stared blankly at the trucks. He raised a hand slowly and held it out as if reaching for something invisible.

Carl shook his head. “Poor kid looks like a zombie.”

“Yeah,” Ross said, “and there’s Dr. Frankenstein.”

A bearded man in a white coat emerged from the nearest doorway and crossed the porch. At the rail, he stepped into a strip of sunlight that caught the lenses of his spectacles, making them look like circles of flame. He shouted at the strange kid, his words angry, fast, and foreign, quick bursts of machine-gun Spanish.

The zombie kid howled and shuffled off into the deeper shadows between the trees.

The man fired another burst of Spanish, Carl picking up one word in
the middle, “
ahora.
” He’d heard the word a thousand times back in the gym, trainers leaning against the ropes and urging their fighters, “
¡Ahora! ¡Ahora!
” . . . “Now! Now!” And then the man was hurrying off the porch, after the shambling kid, a snarl parting his beard as he descended the stairs.

But then, noticing the trucks and orphans for the first time, he jerked to a stop. His snarl faded, and his arms, which had been waving angrily, lowered to his sides. His beard parted again, this time with a smile, and he gave the slightest nod to the soldiers carrying the stretcher. Next, turning once more in the direction the zombie kid had fled, he raised one arm, fluttered his fingers, and called softly into the shadows, looking like a man politely requesting the service of a busy waiter.

What was going on here?

“Check it out,” Ross said, pointing to the building. “There are bars in the windows. Boston Pediatric, it ain’t.”

The others climbed back onto their truck. “Let’s roll,” a drill sergeant said, and everyone started moving again. Carl saw the bearded man with eyes of fire disappear into the shadows, and before long the medical center was far behind them.

The road dipped, and after a slow descent, the truck rumbled onto a rough log bridge that crossed a wide, swampy area. Kids pointed at snakes hanging from trees.

“You get a bite from one of those snakes,” a nearby soldier with a Southern twang said, “and you’re one dead orphan.”

On the other side of the swamp, they reentered the jungle, and the woods grew even darker. Through the murky gloom, Carl thought he saw heavy fog or perhaps smoke hanging in the trees. He pointed it out to Ross, who leaned forward and squinted.

“Holy crap,” he said. “That’s not fog. They’re spiderwebs.”

Carl shuddered. “Jeez, webs that size, what do they eat—cows?”

“Orphans,” Ross said, but neither of them laughed.

The trucks topped a rise and drove through a tall gate flanked by soldiers holding what looked like automatic weapons. Carl took note of more buildings; a wide, paved lot with a tall flagpole at its center; and a high fence encircling the entire compound.

“The phoenix,” Ross said, pointing to the banner fluttering atop the pole.

The flag was black and showed something like an eagle with its wings spread, red flames all around it.

“What’s with the fire?” Carl said.

“Mythology,” Ross said. “When a phoenix dies, it bursts into flames. Then it’s reborn from its own ashes. It’s used as a symbol of rebirth and—”

Their truck jerked to a sudden stop.

“Off the trucks!” a drill sergeant yelled. “On the double, orphans! Girls to the left, boys to the right. I see anybody slacking, he’s going to the sweatbox. You, shut your mouth! I see anybody talk, he’s going in the sweatbox. Form it up outside. Work it, orphans!”

The sweatbox.
This whole place feels like a sweatbox,
Carl thought, and hoped Davis would be all right.

They hurried off the trucks, and drill sergeants yelled at them and formed them up and yelled at them some more, telling them the way things would be. They would speak only when spoken to, and that sort of thing. Nothing Carl hadn’t expected.

Catching a quick glimpse of the white-haired girl standing at attention with the other girls, he saw that they had female drill sergeants yelling at them. Carl forced his eyes back to his own instructor, who pointed toward the gate. “It would behoove you, orphans, to memorize that warning right now.”

Carl spotted the sign just as the drill sergeant read it aloud. “Runners die!”

Someone up in a tower made a high-pitched squealing sound. Carl saw a silhouette against the sun, the black line of a rifle barrel jutting from its shadowy form.

“I note this for your safety, orphans,” the drill sergeant addressing them said, and pointed toward the fence. “That jungle will eat you alive. Bad things live out there. Bad, bad things. This fence right here? It’s not to keep you in. It’s to keep them out. You go AWOL here, it’s a death sentence.”

“Hooah!” the soldier atop the tower hollered, and ripped the air with machine-gun fire.

Carl tensed but didn’t break ranks. Some guys overreacted. One of the gang guys ducked down onto the pavement, eyes wide with fear.

The drill sergeant continued. “Even if, by some miracle, you made it out of the jungle alive, the ocean around Phoenix Island is nothing but teeth and blood. Hammerhead sharks. Do you read me, orphans?”

“Yes, Drill Sergeant,” a chorus of voices replied.

“You better read me. And I mean Lima Charlie. Loud and clear. That water boils with monsters.”

“Cool,” some kid said.

“Lock it up, Chatty Cathy!”

Runners die,
Carl thought. No escape, no parole: a terminal facility.

All right. He’d just dig in and tough it out. Only two years till his eighteenth birthday. Not even. Closer to one and a half.