SYLO (THE SYLO CHRONICLES) (34 page)

We had gotten maybe halfway across the bridge when she jammed on the brakes. Tori grabbed my arm as we skidded forward. I thought for sure that we were going over the side but Olivia managed to keep the Jeep going straight until we came to a stop.

“Why did you do that?” I demanded.

“What’s that?” Olivia cried nervously, pointing forward.

Something was on the bridge ahead of us. In the dark it appeared to be a moving gray shape.

“Kent?” Olivia whined, her anxiety growing.

“It’s okay,” Kent said with confidence.

He got out of the Jeep, walked to the front, and stood directly between the two headlights.

“Flash the lights,” Kent commanded. “Two short. Two long. Two short.”

“What?” Olivia asked, totally confused.

“I’ll do it,” Tori said impatiently and reached forward.

She flashed the lights, just as Kent had instructed.

The gray shape offered a reply with its own flashing light. Two long. Two short. Two long.

“Very James Bond,” I said.

Kent got back in the Jeep and said, “Drive. Slowly.”

Olivia obeyed. She gently stepped on the gas and we rolled forward, staying a good thirty yards behind the gray shape that now looked to be moving back toward Chinicook.

“Friends of yours?” I asked Kent.

Kent didn’t answer.

After a nerve-wracking few minutes, we reached the far end of the bridge and drove onto the sand of Chinicook Island. Now that we were closer, I saw that the gray shape was actually a group of four people.

Kent turned to us and said, “This is what SYLO wants to know about.”

“What?” Tori asked. “A bunch of people hiding out in the dark?”

“Hiding out in the dark,” Kent said. “And planning to take the island back.”

Kent got out and went to the group. They all shook hands.

“This is just plain creepy,” Olivia said.

I couldn’t argue with her.

Tori and I got out of the Jeep and stood in front, not sure of what to say or do. If what Kent had said was true, we had found the
people Granger referred to as “rogues.” It sounded like some kind of revolutionary underground that wanted to fight back against SYLO. Knowing that, all of Kent’s caution about saying anything about his plan made sense. It raised him up in my estimation. At least a little.

“Tori?” one of the gray shadows called. “Is that you, Tickle?”

Tori immediately tensed up. “Daddy?”

The man hurried toward us and I quickly recognized him as the guy who was sitting aboard the
Tori Tickle
working on his lobster traps when I first visited their house.

Tori ran into his arms and the two hugged.

“What are you doing here?” he cried, full of emotion.

“I gotta ask you the same thing,” Tori said through her tears.

Another mystery was solved. We now knew why Michael Sleeper wasn’t hanging around the SYLO compound.

“Young Tucker Pierce!” called another of the shadows. “Never thought I’d be seeing you out this way.”

It was my turn to tense up, but not for the same reason as Tori. I knew that voice and as soon as I heard it, I realized that yet another mystery had been solved.

I knew where Kent had gotten the Ruby.

The man stepped forward and held out his hand to shake. “Welcome to the revolution,” he said with a warm smile.

It was Mr. Feit.

I
didn’t shake his hand.

I punched the smile off his face.

“Whoa, dude!” Kent yelled with surprise the second my fist connected with Feit’s chin.

I’ll put the blame on the lingering effects of the Ruby. It’s easier than saying I had lost control. Or maybe I wasn’t the same guy I used to be, but in that moment, the smug smiling face of Feit represented all that had gone wrong on Pemberwick Island.

Hitting him felt pretty good.

Feit’s head snapped to the side and he went down hard, landing on his butt. I hadn’t knocked him out, but he wasn’t in a hurry to get back up again.

At first nobody made a move. I think they were stunned and maybe afraid I might take a swing at them too. After a tense few seconds, Tori walked up to me and said softly, “Can I hit him next?”

Her words actually calmed me down, which I think she was trying to do.

Feit rubbed his aching jaw and when he looked up at me, the smile was gone. I had knocked it into next week.

“You can hit me again if it’ll make you feel better,” he said.

“I don’t need your permission,” I snarled.

Kent approached me and said, “I don’t blame you, man, but you should listen to what he’s got to say.”

I looked around at the others. They were keeping their distance, staring at me with concern, wondering what I would do next. I liked the feeling. For a change, I was the one in control.

“Get up,” I ordered.

Feit gingerly got to his feet, making sure that he was out of punching range. He looked the exact same as I’d remembered him, complete with baggy shorts, flip-flops, a hoodie, and a few days’ growth of beard. He looked every bit the part of a surfer dude who was a little too old to be a surfer dude.

“I get it,” he said, with no hint of his usual charm. He wasn’t laughing either. “Some of the people who took the Ruby died. That’s tragic and I have a lot to do with it. But it wasn’t all my fault.”

“
You
brought it here,” I said.

“I did.”

“And you were the one getting people to use it.”

“Guilty,” he admitted.

“And it was your company that made it.”

Feit didn’t reply to that right away.

“That’s what you told me,” I said.

“I know,” he admitted. “I lied.”

“So then where did it come from?” Tori asked.

Feit looked to Mr. Sleeper as if asking his permission to answer.

“Tell him,” Mr. Sleeper said. “You owe him that much.”

Feit let out a laugh, though it was more out of nervousness than anything else.

“I do work for a company that makes sports supplements,” he said. “It’s my own company. I’m the only employee. I’m a biochemist. MIT graduate.”

“If you’re trying to impress me, I might have to hit you again,” I said.

“Okay, sorry,” he said, laughing.

I almost clocked him again just for that annoying laugh, but I held back.

“About a year ago this guy came to me. Said he worked for a well-funded private think tank that was developing a revolutionary dietary supplement. He said it was light years ahead of anything else out there, but they were running into problems getting it tested and quickly approved by the government. He said if I helped them, I’d be a joint patent holder when it finally got approval. Do you know how much money something like that is worth?”

“No,” I said flatly.

“A lot. Millions. Many millions. To a guy who is struggling just to get by, it’s too tempting an offer to resist.”

Tori asked, “What did he want you to do?”

“Run a test. A secret test. In a contained, controlled environment…like an island community.”

“Like Pemberwick Island,” Kent added.

“Yeah. He wanted me to casually introduce it to the population, take notes, record all the results, and then get back to him.
He said with that data they could streamline their testing and cut years off the approval process. He promised me it was safe…and offered an incredible future. So I went for it.”

“But the tests didn’t go so well,” Tori said.

“They went
too
well!” Feit said. “A lot of people took it. Most you don’t even know about. The Ruby did everything it was supposed to do. The problem was dosage—and controlling it. It wasn’t until Marty Wiggins that…”

“That people started to die,” I said, finishing the thought.

“So the Ruby has nothing to do with SYLO?” Tori said. “Or the quarantine?”

“Oh, no,” Feit said quickly. “SYLO has everything to do with the Ruby being here.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“The guy who came to me with the offer was Captain Granger.”

I thought my knees would buckle.

“No!” Tori said with a gasp.

“Yes,” Feit said. “I had no idea he was actually working for the government. With the military. There wasn’t anybody more surprised than me when he stepped onto this island with an invasion force. I’ve been hiding ever since.”

“But…why?” was all I could say. “Why would our own government poison us with that stuff?”

“Or invade us,” Kent said. “None of this adds up.”

“Whatever the reason, you’re still responsible,” Tori said to Feit with disgust. “You’re going to prison for this.”

Feit shrugged. “I’m already in prison. We all are. Irony is, the Ruby might be our only hope of getting out.”

“No,” I declared. “No way.”

“Easy there, Rook,” Kent said. “It helped us break out of the SYLO camp, didn’t it?”

“We smuggled the Ruby into the SYLO compound,” Mr. Sleeper said. “We’ve got a lot of people on our side.”

“Who is we?” Tori asked.

“People who are ready to fight back,” Mr. Sleeper said. “Many of them were picked up by Granger and his thugs and stuck in that camp. He doesn’t want anybody challenging his authority.”

I thought back to how all the prisoners kept to themselves and wondered how many of them were part of this group…whatever this group was.

“Look,” Kent said. “I hate this scum. The Ruby killed my father, remember? But if it gives us a way to fight back, I say we use it. Use
him
. Just like we did tonight.”

“You mean just like
I
did tonight,” I corrected.

“Whatever. After that he can hang, for all I care.”

There was a long moment of silence, and then…

“I don’t know about you people, but I would really like to get off this crappy island and go home,” Olivia said softly.

Tori’s father stepped between the two of us, but faced me.

“You should see what’s going on here, son,” he said. “This Feit character is only part of it.”

“I thought they arrested you,” I said.

“They took me out of the house, but we never quite made it to the golf course,” he said, then smiled knowingly. “Somewhere along the route there’s a wrecked Hummer and a couple of soldier boys with severe headaches.”

“You don’t mess with my dad,” Tori said proudly.

Mr. Sleeper was a big guy with thick arms and huge hands that came from a lifetime of working on boats. There was nothing complicated about him. When he spoke, he looked you straight in the eye, and if he was anywhere near as good as his daughter at taking down people who crossed him, I had no doubt that the SYLO soldiers who had arrested him regretted it.

“C’mon,” he said. “Let me show you.”

I looked at Tori, who shrugged and nodded. She didn’t like Feit any more than I did, but she wasn’t about to argue with her father.

“Okay,” I said and instantly felt the tension melt away from the group.

Mr. Sleeper looked to the other men and said, “Get that Jeep out of sight.”

The guys got right on it and took charge of the Jeep while Mr. Sleeper led us along the sandy road, headed deeper onto the island. He had one arm around Tori, while I walked on his other side. Kent was next to me. The rest followed, including Feit.

“We started this group a couple of days after SYLO landed,” Sleeper began. “It was casual at first. A bunch of us old-timers got together to try and sort it all out. Nobody bought the story they were feeding us about the quarantine. We tried contacting the state and even made some calls to Washington but kept hitting stone walls or getting doubletalk. We started holding meetings every couple of nights at a different location for fear of Granger catching on to us.”

“How did I not know about this?” Tori asked.

“I didn’t want you involved.”

Tori snickered. “Great. I thought I was protecting you and the whole time you were in way deeper than any of us.”

“My father was part of it,” Kent added. “That’s how I knew all about it.”

“I kept thinking it would all just go away,” Mr. Sleeper went on. “Of course, it didn’t. More and more frustrated folks started showing up to vent. Not just locals either. Many of them were tourists who came here for vacation and got stuck. It got to be tricky keeping it all quiet. Those SYLO goons were always poking around, asking what we were up to. It came to a head when communications to the mainland got cut.”

“The riot in town,” I said.

“The anger just boiled over. We never bought the virus story. It wasn’t until Feit here paid us a visit that we knew for sure.”

“Knew what?” Tori asked.

“That there was no virus.”

Feit came forward and said, “I told them why people were dying. I wanted to…”

His voice trailed off.

“Just say it,” Mr. Sleeper demanded.

“I wanted to confess,” Feit said, barely above a whisper. “I told them how everyone who died had taken the Ruby…and that Granger was behind it all.”

I glanced at Kent. He kept his eyes on the ground but I could feel his anger bubbling.

“That’s when we knew we had to do something,” Mr. Sleeper said. “Sitting back and waiting for it all to blow over wasn’t going
to happen. So we mobilized and came out here. It took a while. We didn’t want to raise any suspicion. We could only move at night and had to cover our tracks. But we made it. Been here a couple of days now.”

“You’re all just camping out here?” I asked.

“Not exactly out,” Sleeper said. “More like camping under.”

We were met in the road by a guy carrying a shotgun with the stock against his shoulder, up and aimed.

“It’s okay,” Mr. Sleeper said to him. “It’s my daughter and her friends.”

I knew the guy. He worked at the drugstore in town. He lowered the gun and said, “Welcome.”

We walked past him and then by five other men and women who were stationed on the road to keep out unwanted visitors. I knew them all. One guy worked on my dad’s car. I recognized a woman who taught algebra at the middle school. There was even a husband and wife who owned one of the ice-cream stores in Arbortown. Seeing them guarding the desolate island, with weapons, was like stepping into a surreal dream.

“Won’t it be easy for SYLO to find us?” Tori asked. “I mean, they have helicopters.”