The Islands at the End of the World (24 page)

* * *

On Thursday I count pills. Only twelve left.
Should I start taking only one each day?
I think.
I doubt it would be enough. I need the full dosage for it to work
.

I swallow my evening dose.

I must get home. This week
.

* * *

On Friday morning we pack up the tent. I cough blood for the first time. My throat stings. I take my next iodide tablet in a bit of a stupor, wiping the blood spatter off my hands so Dad won’t see it. Is this what I’m fighting for? A lifelong struggle to stay one step ahead of an invisible monster that’ll still be around millions of years after I’m gone? Kai and I watch Mom and Dad and Grandpa waste away and die while we figure out how to fend for ourselves? I grabbed tons of this stuff, but it will eventually run out. What then? Will we be the only two civilians left on the islands?

“You okay?” Dad asks.

I nod, change the subject. “You know what today is?”

Dad searches, shakes his head. “No idea.”

“Last day of school.”

“Really?” Dad looks up, the calculator in his head churning away. “Wow, Lei. Congrats. You’re a senior.”

“Thanks. Where’s my new car?”

Dad sits down. He buries his head in his hands. “Dad? I was just making a joke.”

“We were going to get you one,” he says.

“What?”

“A car. Not a new one. Something used. You were going to pick it out.” He still won’t look up at me.

A car. I don’t know what to say. I sit down cross-legged next to him. He’s crying. I wrap my arm around him, rest my head on his shoulder.

“Thank you.” I have to whisper it so my voice doesn’t crack.

He wipes his tears away. “It’s the thought that counts, right?” His grin is sheepish.

“Something like that,” I say.

* * *

“Look at this,” says Dad. Our packs are cinched, and we’re ready to press through the jungle toward Hana. He’s holding out a compass and giving it the stink-eye. I glance at the instrument. The needle won’t settle into one position. It spins, hesitates, and then continues to rotate in an endless search for polarity. It’s as if Dad is moving a magnet around beneath the compass.

“Lovely. How are we going to navigate?”

Dad shrugs, pocketing the compass. “We’re not as easily had as geese. We’re on a slope that drops into the sea. We’ll just cross every river and gully in a perpendicular fashion, and make sure the ocean’s to our left whenever we can catch a glimpse of it.”

We trudge through the tropical forest for two days. The going is torturous, especially the endless chore of climbing
down deeply gouged ravines, crossing angry streams and rivers, and then struggling up their far sides as bursts of rain pelt us. We have run out of mosquito repellent. I think briefly of that mother and her kids in the military camp, but I can’t regret trying to help them. We would have run out eventually anyway. At least we escaped.

Where are those kids now?
I push away the thought.

I do all of the machete chopping; if Dad’s wound were to reopen, tropical microbes could spell his doom. I shouldn’t, but I pick at my itchy forehead. I have no idea how far we’ve come, and I’ve all but forgotten why we felt we needed to slog through the rain forest instead of sticking to the road, when we arrive at a river crossing and stumble upon the bloated and naked body of a woman floating in a rocky pool. Facedown, she twists in lazy circles, her skull brushing the edges of rocks as she turns. The long shaft of an arrow protrudes from her neck.

“Oh, no.” I drop to my knees. We’re looking down at the body from a five-foot-high ledge above the pool. Water rushes along the center of the river, but here, near the bank, it trickles, filling dozens of babbling pools along its meandering course. The woman’s back and legs are puffy and purple, cracked open in places. Flies feast in busy clouds. I turn away.

Dad runs a hand through his hair. Words fail him.

“They just shot her and left her? They couldn’t even collect the body?”

“She probably fell into the water and was carried away. Come on.”

“Shouldn’t we … bury her, or something?” I whisper.

Dad’s voice is soft. “I wish we could. But no. Come on.” Dad looks about nervously, and I feel unseen eyes spying on me from every tree trunk and fern.

We walk upstream to cross the river and fill up on water, clambering up a steep rock face above a short waterfall. We’re going to have to get wet to cross this time; the water here is deep and swift. A taller waterfall gushes farther upstream.

We take a moment to guzzle from our water bottles and refill them, always glancing around. I know we’re upstream from the body, but it must have passed by here at some point, and the thought of drinking from this river at all turns my stomach. Still, I know that with all of our sweating, we can’t afford to pass up any water.

I wade across the river, submerged up to my chest. We rest the packs on our heads to keep them dry as we cross and quickly strap them back on once we’re safe on the far side. Ahead of us the foliage is thick, brambly, steeply sloped. I unsheathe my machete.

“Let’s get out of here,” Dad says. I begin hacking away at the thorny plants choking our way forward.

I hear the growl of a dog. Close.

We freeze. The dog barks. A brown blur materializes out of the trembling underbrush and I fall, a searing, white-hot pain ripping into my thigh. I’m screaming. Dad is screaming. A pile of hell-bent muscle writhes on top of me, razor-sharp teeth clamped into my leg. I bring the machete up and around
as hard as I can. The dog yelps and recoils. My blade slices farther through its shoulder, and it whimpers and slinks into the underbrush.

“Lei!”

Another dog attacks Dad from the other side. I swing around and swipe with my machete. Adrenaline and rage guide my weapon down on top of the dog’s back. Blade meets bone. Vertebrae snap. The dog crumples, its back legs limp, and convulses in agony, yelping wildly.

Someone above us curses.

More barking dogs fan out in a great arc around us. A
whoosh
near my head. Another. An arrow sings to a halt in my backpack.

I’m stunned. Is that me laughing?

“Sheriff’s Department! You’re surrounded. Surrender.”

“The river!” Dad seizes my hand and whips me forward.

A warm pain throbs along my thigh, but I race beside Dad, hunted like a wild pig.

“Stop
now
!”

We hurtle blindly back along the path I’ve cut, the dogs growing nearer. We come upon the rocky bank of the river and leap, packs and all, and then swim with the current toward the short waterfall. A single gunshot rings out above. The current draws us to the edge of the waterfall.

My hands reach for something to grab, dropping the machete, but my pack is too bulky and the water too strong—I tumble over. Nothing I can do but brace to be dashed against the shallow boulders below.

The pool directly beneath the waterfall has been gouged deep by thousands of years of water. I disappear under the water with flailing arms. A great weight crashes down on top of me, sending me farther down. Dad has fallen on me.

My lungs burning for breath, I push for the surface, dragging my pack with me, and finally arise, gasping.

“Lei!” Dad yelps. I clear my eyes and follow his voice. We’re pushed farther downstream by the current. Suddenly my feet are brushing against the boulders of the bottom. Behind Dad I see a dog scrambling down the steep slope of the embankment, growling and barking, delighted by the hunt. Dad and I swim frantically downstream.

Two other dogs join the first. All three of them stop before the body of the woman turning aimlessly in the water. The dogs are torn—inspect their earlier prey or pursue us? One jumps into the river and paddles toward us with patient desire, eyes on us as it concentrates on its difficult task. It could almost be returning a tennis ball to me. But it wants to retrieve me for its master.

Dad plants his feet into the pebbly floor as if applying brakes. He grips me by the shaft of the arrow protruding from my pack and steadies me. The dog overshoots us and begins to paddle against the current in vain. The current will carry it away any second.

Now there’s shouting above the waterfall. Dad shakes my shoulder. He snaps the arrow loose and discards it. “Play dead.”

I go limp, letting the swift current drag me into another
accelerating funnel. I see four men rise into view, silhouetted against the ledge of the waterfall. The second man holds a compound bow. He points at us and shouts orders. The fourth man lifts a handgun and fires at us. I don’t move. There’s nothing I can do.

We tumble over another waterfall. This one is a longer drop, the water below shallower, but we both land on our backs, packs cushioning us from the rocks beneath the water.

Dad coughs and grunts. I take a deep breath. My eyes are everywhere at once, focused and keen. No dogs. No hunters.

“Up the far bank.” Dad pulls me along. We trudge through the water as if running in a nightmare, going more slowly the harder we try. The dog that swam after us surfaces before me and I stifle a cry. But the dog is dead. One of us may have landed on top of it. I push the limp carcass away.

I see a space behind a patch of hanging brambles. “Dad, in here. Quick!”

His eyes light up as he spies the hole. It’s our best bet; we can’t outrun the dogs, and I don’t know how many waterfalls we can survive.

Dad snatches the red collar of the dead dog and drags it behind him. We press through the narrow opening between a boulder and a ledge and duck beneath the vine. We’re suddenly huddled in a tiny alcove carved into the rock: me, Dad, a couple of backpacks, and Fido. In water up to our chests. One big happy family.

I eye Dad. He whispers, “If they find the dog, they’ll expect to find us. If none of us are around, they may continue downstream, or figure we were sucked into a rock tube.”

I bite my lip. My lungs are burning, my thigh is on fire, and my bruised arms feel as if I’ve used them to shatter bricks. The horror settles in, and I hold Dad tightly.
This is insane. They attacked us!

“Shhh. Stay quiet. They’ll miss us. We just need to wait it out.”

“Are you hit? Are you hurt?” I whisper.

“No. Are you?”

“Bad dog bite on my leg, I think.”

“Jesus,” Dad mutters.

“What the hell, Dad? Why are they doing this?”

“Shhh, honey.”

It makes no sense
. I can only close my eyes and clench my jaw.

“Lei, your bag’s open! You’re losing stuff!”

I turn to secure my pack, and my stomach sinks. A shirt and a blister pack of iodide tablets rush away from our hiding spot on the strong current. “No!”

“Stay here.” Dad pulls me back. “Too late.”

“I know, but … if they find it, they’ll know what we have.” Dad shakes his head. “Too late. Shhh.”

The voices approach and then drift away. We are as silent and still as the rocks for several minutes. Then the voices sound nearer. Dad and I shrink against the back wall of our hollow.

A gunshot.

Barking.

The voices grow agitated—and more distant.

Machine-gun fire. Screams.

What’s happening?

Far away, a car horn honks. A motor fires up; then the sound is lost below the rushing water.

“Dad, should we go?”

“No. Could be a trick. Just wait. It’ll be dark soon.”

We wait. And we wait. Tiny fish nibble occasionally on my thigh, and I cage the wound with cupped fingers to keep them away. The mosquitoes don’t have any trouble finding us, and my face soon feels like a pizza. We wait until nightfall before we wade across the river, shivering and starving, stumbling once again into the jungle, this time without even a blade to clear our way. The pain in my leg is exquisite, but more than that, I am tortured by every twig snap, terrorized by the thought that it will trigger another onslaught of dogs and murderous foes. But we must take that step. And the next. One after another into the endless swarms of bloodsuckers, through the night and beyond the dawn.

It is our only way home.

The zombie apocalypse is upon us. Dad and I trudge all day through the dark underbrush like the undead, me dragging a hurting thigh and plucking stitches from my forehead, Dad hunched over with exhaustion. We’re covered from head to toe in mosquito bites. We’d make a great outdoor-outfitter ad: sporting our baggy, tattered, dripping-wet quick-dry shorts and button-up shirts, smeared with soils of every color and matted with fern fur. A snapped arrow shaft juts out from my ragged pack.

In the afternoon we stumble into a clearing in the jungle. A dirt road with a wide shoulder on a steep slope cleaves the forest into halves. We have a grand, uninterrupted view of the Pacific Ocean to the north or northeast.

We see a long train of naval ships. Dozens upon dozens of craft—from smaller red-and-white Coast Guard boats all the
way up to battleships—are clustered in a great flock ten miles off the shore, travelling away from Maui at a slight angle.

Dad says, “That’s the entire Hawaiian fleet out there.”

“Wow,” I mutter. “Maybe … they’re deploying some defense.”

“What if we’re at war?” Dad thinks aloud. But he concludes, “No. They wouldn’t be taking Coast Guard tugboats into battle. This doesn’t make any sense.”

I remember what Aukina said to me at the Marine Corps Base the afternoon before we escaped:
“We’re out of gas. Unnecessary flights have already stopped. We need what’s left for something big. Our orders are to …”

But he had trailed off. And finished by saying,
“I’d take you and your dad with us if I could.”

I’d take you with us.… Something big …
 “Dad,” I say. “These are the orders Aukina was hinting at. They’ve been ordered to leave. They’re just … leaving.”

Is Aukina on one of those ships? Did he take his family with him? I hope he’s safe
.

“Lei, the US military’s not going to
leave
Hawai`i. The generals wouldn’t ditch this state. The reason these islands were occupied to begin with is their strategic significance in the Pacific. They’re going to clamp down on supply lines and farmlands and snuff out all the bickering. People don’t abdicate power for no reason.”