Page 32 of The Dead of Summer

Guards grab my arms and pull me around the back of the tent. I only get out one shout for help before someone slugs me in the face. Stars shoot into the back of my skull, but I force my feet to dig into the gravel.

“Ollie? Ollie?”

I twist around, and Bash is running along the tents. More guards are closing a gate between us. He shakes it, shouting my name. His hair is still in pigtails.

The guards drag me toward one of the anonymous gray buildings.

Scientists in white coats step aside and peer at me.

Briefly, through a gap between buildings, I’m able to see down to the beach of Devil’s Clutch where the Embrace awaits.

Is that where I’m going? Am I getting off the island?

A fleet of smaller boats cling to the Embrace , ferrying supplies to the research pier.

More tents have sprung up, white masses clinging to the coast like fungus.

It’s like the reverse of town. Here, the natural world is being infested by people.

We don’t turn toward the Embrace . I’m pivoted to a doorway held open by people in hazmat suits. Taped signs warn what lies beyond.

ENTERING CONTAMINATION AREA. NO UNAUTHORIZED PERSONNEL BEYOND THIS POINT.

“No!” I shout. “Please! I’m okay! I’m okay!

” I try to shake the hands off me, but I only earn myself another punch to the head.

Time cracks and I slip into a throbbing nothing, then all at once I’m back in myself and the world has jumped ahead without me.

I must have passed out. Now I’m sideways, lying on a cold floor.

Colorless lights glare down at me, and black windows watch from the wall.

“Oh thank god.”

Elisa is next to me. She helps me sit up. I wince, somehow my entire head aching. Congealed blood cracks in the corners of my mouth, and I do my best to clean my teeth with my tongue.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” Elisa whispers. “I tried to warn you, but it happened so fast.”

My memories are drifty, slithering apart as I try to piece together how I got here. Elisa puts herself between me and the observation window, lowering her voice to a whisper.

“Don’t be mad, okay? I got called in for testing.

They had everyone’s samples in a crate, so I found yours and …

I did something. You know when Scary Mary crumbled?

I took a bit of the white coral. I don’t know why, I guess I thought we could study it.

It crushes really easily, so I slipped a little into your sample. Mine too.”

Either I’m still half-unconscious, or Elisa’s plan only makes half sense.

“You got us back in quarantine?” I grumble. “On purpose ?”

“Just trust me, okay? Now that you’re up they’re going to come back in here. And you’re going to sneeze. Okay?”

Sneeze?

My head is throbbing. The lights are so bright that I can hear them.

I don’t think I heard a single word right, but sure enough the doors open a few seconds later and in stroll two men in hazmat suits, carrying trays of strange equipment.

They lean over me. One holds me down while the other prepares to inject something into my arm.

Right as the needle punctures my skin, Elisa bursts from her corner and tears the hood off one of the men.

Suddenly, I’m face-to-face with a young man.

At first he’s surprised, then he’s annoyed, and then he’s afraid.

I sneeze.

It’s a perfectly cartoonish spray of blood and spit. The man screams like I just belched fire. The other hazmat runs for the door, unlocking it with a key card right before the man grabs his legs and drags him back, begging, “Don’t leave me! Please! Help me!”

We don’t see how the struggle ends. Elisa plucks the fallen key card, and the door locks behind us as we rush out.

The hallway is blessedly clear, but we already hear footsteps coming our way.

Elisa uses the card to get us into the observation room—a cramped amphitheater of benches—and at the top is a sign marked EXIT .

We run for it, through another door, down a hall, and into a dark laboratory.

I do my best to stay by her side, but the way she moves through this place is like trying to trail a minnow through a maze, and I remember her mom used to work here.

We huddle in the dark until the sounds of people outside pass.

Ahead, an office has been left open, and faintly I hear the ocean through a cracked window.

The window is just big enough for us to get through.

Now we’re on the outer perimeter of the camp but facing a fence nearly as tall as the building we just escaped.

Elisa doesn’t stop moving for a second, though.

She leads us along the building, up an embankment.

“Wait,” I whisper, even though out here the ocean breeze is loud in my ears. “We’re heading away from the camp!”

Elisa nods but doesn’t stop. She knows exactly where she’s going. We duck low, letting a Hummer crunch by, and when the coast is clear, we cross a narrow lot, to a back door of the visitors center. Elisa tries the card and, after a breathless pause, the door clicks open and we dart inside.

Panting, with our backs pressed to the door, we now stand in some utility room of the visitors center. It’s cold and it’s quiet, and the air stinks with the smell of a thousand gallons of aquarium water that badly needs filtering. If that’s any sign, no one has been here in ages.

I can’t help it. I let out a little laugh of appreciation at Elisa’s savviness in escape artistry.

She grins at me and says, “Gesundheit.”

I bow, entirely willing to praise my own kind of genius.

We explore the building slowly at first, making sure there are no leftover aquarium workers lurking in the shadows.

The stink, we discover, emanates from the tidal pool display, which has mostly desiccated into a grave of rotting starfish and anemones.

The fish tanks themselves are all running just fine, filling the darkened building with shimmering blue light.

We sit in front of the octopus display with a pilfered picnic of junk food from the gift shop.

The obvious question is what to do next, but the obvious answer is that if we knew what to do next, we probably wouldn’t be covered in Cheetos dust inside an abandoned aquarium.

Running seems to be the obvious answer, but Elisa now seems hesitant.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” she says, dusting off her hands. “About my mom’s research, and where she might have hid it.”

“Any ideas?”

“A million ideas,” Elisa groans. “As a kid, I thought finding it would be like a game, like it’d be in a supercool hiding spot. Like those fake books they sell at the novelty shop. A hidden treasure that only I would know about, because only I would know where to look.”

“She never gave you any hints?”

“That’s the thing. I’m sure she gave me lots of hints. She was always trying to tell me stuff, about her research, about the island, about the sea, but I never wanted to listen. I could tell people thought she was crazy, and I was afraid they would think I was crazy, too.”

Elisa has made a tiny scene using gummy sharks swimming around the untied laces of her shoe.

“It must have been hard for her,” she says. “Trying to tell people the truth, people not wanting to listen. And I just made it harder.”

“She loved you. And I know if she could see you now, undermining Pfaff at every opportunity, she would be proud.”

“I feel like I’m letting her down,” Elisa says, poking at the sharks.

“If you found her lighter, what would you do with it?”

“Blow this place up.” Elisa laughs.

I contribute a few fish-shaped crackers to Elisa’s snack aquarium. We run out of food and end up contemplating the octopus tank. It’s dark, the animal hardly more than a rippling tentacle in the back corner.

“Why this tank?” Elisa asks me. “You sat right down in front of it.”

She’s got me there. “Every time I’ve been here, the octopus has been hiding, and I thought maybe it would come out if it knew we were hiding, too. Plus, I just think they’re cool, you know? This was my favorite exhibit growing up. What about you?”

Elisa takes a second to think. “Whenever we came here, my mom brought me to the lab buildings mostly. Real science, she called it, but of course I would whine and beg until we got to come in here. And now it all seems so childish, you know?”

“But what was your favorite animal?”

“You’re gonna make fun of me.”

“Try me.”

“The stupid singing whale. Something about the size of it was so terrifying to me. I used to bang on those buttons forever, and my mom would be like …” Elisa lifts her voice to capture her mom’s musical scolding.

“Elisabete, I show you the wonders of the sea, and you fall in love with this grotesque puppet!”

I laugh, because really the thing was kind of grotesque. I look around, wondering if it’s still in the room with us.

“Did you know you could go inside it? There’s an air pocket where the blowhole is,” Elisa offers. “She showed me once, when the pool was drained. She had to fish stuff out of there all the time that people dropped in. She never returned any of it. She called it hidden treasure and …”

I grab her arm. We jump to our feet, scattering the snack aquarium. We’ve both had the same thought at the same time.

Treasure.

We turn to the backmost tank, where the horrifying whale sleeps. Even in the dim light, I can see its immense shape through the murky water.

Elisa steps toward it. “Do you think—”

Elsewhere in the building, a door bangs open, and our time alone in the aquarium comes to an end.