The Island (4 page)

The boy grunted as he took Shaw’s weight.

Underneath the sheet Shaw felt the boy’s fingers entwine with his. The boy squeezed his hand tightly and then released it. He sniffled, and Shaw wondered if he’d hurt him. It took him a moment to realize what the sounds meant: gratitude and relief.

Shaw rolled off the boy, patting him on the shoulder. He listened to the boy as he cried quietly in the moonlight and wished he could show him some real affection.

“Shut your mouth,” he said instead, his tone harsh.

The boy stiffened immediately, choking back the sobs.

Shaw sought out his hand under the sheet, and held it. He rubbed his thumb back and forth over the boy’s palm, back and forth, back and forth until the boy slipped into sleep.

Dangerous. Remember this is dangerous.

You need to focus.

Shaw wondered what the fuck he was doing.

* * * *

Shaw sat at the table and flipped open his laptop. What time was it in Sydney? It didn’t matter, he supposed. It was never too early or too late to contact Callie. The woman was a godsend.

He looked across at the bed. The boy was sleeping there. His body looked otherworldly in the moonlight. The planes of his back glowed, and Shaw wanted nothing more than to lie beside him and trace the path of the moonlight across the boy’s skin with his hand.

Shit, shit, shit
. Shaw stared at the boy until he saw past the lure of his glowing flesh. He was too pale, Shaw thought, and too thin. Vornis needed to let him into the sun more often and maybe feed him once in a while. That was a victim lying in Shaw’s bed, not a temptation. He had to remember that.

There was a new message from Callie regarding his flight from Nadi to Sydney. The ticket had been prepaid, but the date had not yet been confirmed. It had been too long since he’d been home, and the thought of a few weeks in Australia sounded good. Shaw was sick of Los Angeles, and Callie had known it, clever thing.

She’d sent a picture of Molly as well, and Shaw smiled when he saw it. He’d missed Molly, even if the last time he’d seen her she had chewed the handle off his briefcase and managed to pee everywhere except the newspaper he’d put down. She’d grown. She wasn’t a puppy anymore.

When he was back home, he’d pick up Molly from Callie’s place and head north. A few weeks in Ayr playing on the beach with Molly would clear his head.

He replied to Callie’s e-mail. He and the merchandise had arrived safely. Things were going well. He looked forward to catching up.

Shaw looked across to the bed again, at the sleeping boy, and then back to his laptop. He stretched, rolling his shoulders, then hunkered forward to protect the screen from prying eyes:
8 weeks ago a US (?) unit attacked V’s Colombian compound. Find out who. One survivor is here. Shaw.

It was risky, but he had to know. He sent it before he could regret it.

Chapter Three

What’s the first thing you remember?

He always asked himself the question. He didn’t know why, but he knew it was important. It was something beyond the bruises and the blood and this body that was racked with pain. It was something
before
. That was it. That was what he had to remember. There was something before.

He moved his fingers down his body and discovered a round mark on his hip. He pressed it, and it flared with pain. A burn. It was a burn.

He remembered the cigarette now. He remembered the ember coming closer and closer, and how he’d tried to twist away even though it didn’t matter. It never mattered. Never made a difference. They always hurt him.

But there was something before. There was someone he had been, in a different place from here.

A moth fluttered up toward the lights inside, brushing against his face. He felt its fragile wings snag in his eyelashes. He raised a hand to sweep it away, but it was already gone. There were lots of insects here because it was so hot. Even the nights here were warm.

He frowned. If he knew the nights were warm here, had he once known different nights? He searched for them in his memory, but there was nothing.

What’s the first thing you remember?

He remembered the sound of the ocean. No, he wasn’t remembering that. He was hearing it now, the tiny waves chasing one another up the beach and the low, rhythmic pull of the water as it drew them back. The ocean was very loud. The only time he didn’t hear it was in the room in the house where they took him.

He shivered. The only thing he heard inside that room was the men laughing, and the sounds that were wrenched out of him when he did the things that made them laugh so hard.

The ocean was good. If he could hear the ocean, he wasn’t in that room. So where was he?

He was kneeling on wooden boards. He twisted his head. There was light coming from a doorway, the same light that had drawn the moth from out of the darkness. There was a carving on the doorpost. Turtles. Three turtles.

He ran his tongue over his dry lips.

He heard voices farther out in the darkness. It was the men who had brought him here. He didn’t like them. He was afraid of them.

Once, before, he’d been something else. Why couldn’t he remember? It was important to remember.

He closed his eyes. Sometimes it hurt to remember, but it was a different sort of hurt than he was feeling now. He remembered that. Nothing else, though. He couldn’t catch his own thoughts. They were there, fluttering just out of reach, like moths looking for the light. He reached for them, dumb, clumsy, and missed them every time.

He opened his eyes again and scratched the inside of his elbow. There were scabs on his skin. He couldn’t see them in the darkness, but he felt them flake off as he snagged them with his fingernails.

He was on drugs. That was the problem. That was why he couldn’t catch his own thoughts. The slow realization brought a frown. Why was he on drugs? That wasn’t right. How had that happened?

What’s the first thing you remember?

He remembered the rain. It had rained. It had happened earlier, but he didn’t know how much time had passed. The rain had felt good on his skin. Clean. It had tasted good as well.

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Concentrate. What’s the first thing you remember?

Snow. He remembered snow. Snow that melted on his tongue. He remembered the smell of pine needles. He remembered being home for Christmas.

His breath caught in his throat.
Home.

Snow. Pine needles. Christmas.

Hold it. Hold it. Don’t let it go.

Too late. There were insects buzzing in the air, like static. He turned his face to the sound and opened his eyes. A small brown frog made its way across the boards of the veranda. It didn’t jump. It crawled instead, extending its long, thin back legs as it propelled its way tentatively along. He watched it for a moment and forgot that he’d ever been anywhere else.

The night was warm. The gentle roar of the ocean made him tired, like it was whispering a lullaby to him. He wanted to sleep—he
always
wanted to sleep—but he couldn’t. They’d put him here on his knees, and even if he didn’t know his own name, he knew what that meant. They weren’t finished with him yet. He swayed on his knees.

The frog reached the edge of the veranda and leaped into the darkness.

It was dark, and he was tired, and he hurt.

He heard the woman’s voice from inside: “Good night, Mr. Shaw.”

Irina. That was her name. She was nice to him. It hurt when she put iodine on his broken skin, but she blew on it afterward to take away the sting. She called him
ukochany
. He didn’t know what it meant, but he liked the sound of her voice when she said it.

Her shoes creaked on the boards of the veranda.

He watched as a mosquito floated drowsily around his forearm. He turned his arm and tried to make a fist to crush it in but missed. He always missed. He sighed and closed his eyes again.

The veranda boards creaked again.

He opened his eyes and saw bare feet and legs. He didn’t look any higher. He was too tired for that.

“Get inside.”

His aching muscles obeyed the tone of command in the voice before it had even registered in his mind. He rose and moved into the light, blinking. He saw a carved post by the door: three turtles. They seemed familiar, but he couldn’t remember having seen them ever before. Rattan matting scratched his feet. There were steps.

His body knew what to do when the man told him to get into the shower. He fumbled with the button on his fly. It took his fingers a long time to manage it. The floor was coral. Like a beach.

What’s the first thing you remember?

The rain.

No, this wasn’t rain. He looked up and saw stars. He was standing under the sky. The man was talking to him, touching him, but he only saw the stars.

“Name, rank, number.”

A shudder ran through him, and he didn’t know why.
Before
. There was something before. Oh God. Pine trees and snow and Christmas, and something else. Something important. A helicopter. Mountains. A dark green landscape he had never seen before.
Get down! Get down
! But it was already too late.

It was important to remember. But why was it important? It would hurt. God, he knew it would hurt.

He was naked. He was standing under a shower under the stars, and then he wasn’t. The man put his hand on the small of his back and propelled him up the steps. Moths pinged against the lights. He looked up, and coronas appeared. He blinked.

What’s the first thing you remember?

Don’t want to. Don’t want to.

The mattress was firm, but it was the softest thing he had felt since…since…

Doesn’t matter.

The man moved above him, but he didn’t feel anything. That was strange. It should have hurt. It usually hurt. They always made sure of that. Something was different this time, and he wasn’t sure what to do with different.

It didn’t hurt, and the man didn’t look pleased.

He had a handsome face. His hair was dark blond, sun-bleached. He had a strong jawline and nice lips and hazel eyes. He wasn’t old, and he wasn’t ugly, and it didn’t hurt.

Then, suddenly, it did, but not in the way he’d expected.

The man jabbed him in the abdomen, and he twisted away. He met the man’s eyes.
That’s it
, he thought he saw there;
that’s it
. The man jabbed him again.

“No! Please, no!” The words came so easily. They were always waiting in his throat, fully formed, until he could just get enough breath behind them to push them out. They had become the most natural words in the world.

The man smiled slightly. It was a pleased smile, but it was also a tight smile. A moment later, he felt the man’s hot cum splash against his stomach, and the man fell forward.

Tears constricted his throat. The man hadn’t hurt him, not really. He couldn’t remember the last time a man had made the choice not to hurt him, and it overwhelmed him now. He was lying in a bed, and the man was holding his hand and stroking his thumb across his palm, and he hadn’t hurt him.

What’s the first thing you remember?

This.

* * * *

Afterward, Irina came and fetched him back to the house. She took him to his room there—a tiny, dark place very close to the room he hated—and sat him down on the thin, stained mattress. She murmured soothing words that he didn’t understand as she wiped a warm sponge over his shivering flesh.

He liked Irina. He loved her, he thought. She was the only person he could remember who had ever shown him any kindness.

He thought back to the man with the hazel eyes. Except until tonight.

Irina left him and locked the door.

This isn’t a sanctuary, he told himself without understanding what it meant. This is a prison.

But nobody ever hurt him in his dark little room.

He sat on the mattress and leaned his head against the wall. Irina had left him a cup of water, but his hands were shaking too much to risk reaching for it.

He thought of the man in the bungalow with the turtles. What had happened there, he knew, had to stay a secret. The others wouldn’t like it if they knew the man hadn’t hurt him.

He sighed and closed his eyes. It had been so long since he’d had a secret he wasn’t sure what to do with it. He wasn’t sure if he would even remember it, or if it would just fade away like everything else, lost in the static in his head. A wave of fierce desperation rose up in him, and he was shocked at its intensity.
What’s the first thing you remember? This is important!

He remembered the jungle. He remembered the color of the mud on his boots. He remembered someone shouting:
“Get down! Get down!”
He remembered thinking he was going to die. But he hadn’t.

His eyes flashed open, and his heart raced. He should have been dead, but he wasn’t. He should have been dead. He’d
wanted
to be dead.

The thought unsettled him because he didn’t understand it. It hinted at complexities he didn’t know he had, hidden so deep inside him that he couldn’t find them. He existed only in this moment, didn’t he? But there must have been something before.

He remembered this room. It was four steps deep and six steps wide; too small to stretch out in, and too low to stand up in. In the gloom, he could make out the marks on the wall where the shelves had been removed. It wasn’t really a room. It was a closet. He shouldn’t have liked sleeping in here. He shouldn’t have become the sort of person who was glad to be locked in a closet.

He would have railed against it, once. Before, when he’d been a different person. He would have fought.

He closed his eyes again. He
had
fought. He’d fought every way he knew how, but it didn’t matter. It hadn’t made a difference.

“Come on. If you give up now, we’ll never make it.”

Tears pricked his eyelids, and his throat ached.