Replica (22 page)

THEY WERE NEARING JACKSONVILLE WHEN they heard about the explosion off Barrel Key, and the fire burning out of control on Spruce Island. Gemma had been searching the radio for something that wouldn't tempt Pete to sing along. It turned out when he wasn't talking, he was singing, usually off-key, and with some random jumble of words that had only a vague relationship to the
actual
lyrics. She was looking for gospel, bluegrass, hard-core rap,
anything
. The first hour of impromptu karaoke had been all right—she'd actually enjoyed his rendition of “Man in the Mirror” and had nearly peed her pants when it turned out he knew every word to Britney Spears's “. . . Baby One More Time”—but after the second hour she longed for quiet, especially since Pete wouldn't stop harassing her about singing along.

When she hit a news station, she almost skipped right over it.

“—local officials confirmed the fire . . . at the Haven Institute for—”

“Come on, DJ, how about playing a song?” Pete spun away from the station just as Gemma froze, stunned. The radio skipped to a Jimmy Buffett song.

“No. Stop. Go back, please.” Gemma turned the radio back, past the crackle and hiss of silent frequencies, until she heard the newscaster's voice tune in again.

“. . . unconfirmed rumors . . . a deliberate attack . . .”

Pete was pretending to pout. “Jimmy Buffett, Gemma. That's, like, Florida's national anthem. I think it's mandatory that we hear ‘Margaritaville' at least once a day. Otherwise we might get kicked out of the state.”

“I'm begging you.
Please.
This is important, okay?” She cranked the volume button, but the sound quality was awful. She had no idea where the station was broadcasting from, but it must have been closer to Barrel Key, and the voices kept patching in and out, interspersed with snippets of music from another station.

“Tom, is it true . . . actually took credit on Facebook?”

“. . . problem is . . . nobody talking . . .”

“Police say stay away until . . . situation under control . . .”

“Military presence . . .”

“Rumors of a protest at Barrel Key . . .”

But by then the interference was too great, and they were listening to some old-timey singer warbling about heartbreak. Gemma punched the radio off. She needed silence to think. There was a fire at Spruce Island—possibly an attack. But by whom? And what did it mean? Why would anyone attack a research institute? She thought of the man who'd grabbed her in the parking lot, with his coffee-stink breath and the wide frenzy of his eyes.

“Barrel Key,” Pete said slowly. For once, he wasn't smiling or twitching or trying to make her laugh. He was just frowning, holding tight to the steering wheel with both hands. “That's where you're going, isn't it?”

“That's where you're going to take me,” Gemma said. And maybe it was the way she said it, or the way she looked, but he finally stayed quiet after that.

They got to Barrel Key just after six o'clock. Gemma had powered down her phone hours earlier, after sending a single text to her mom
—Gone to see April in Florida—
just so Kristina wouldn't be tempted to call out the police or the National Guard. Still, she knew her mom would be frantic. She had probably called Gemma's dad by now, too, and this gave Gemma her only satisfaction: he was thousands and thousands of miles away and couldn't punish her.

Barrel Key was one long chain of warehouses and boat
shops, big metal storehouses and bait-and-tackle shacks leaning over on their foundations. The sky, she noticed, was greenish, and only when she rolled her window down and the acrid smell of burning reached her did she realize that the wind had carried ash from Spruce Island.

“Wow,” Pete said as they passed a single motel, the
M
in its sign burned out, buzzing the word
vacancy
at them like a threat. “Great vacation spot. Very, um, authentic.”

“It's more of a working vacation,” she said, because she knew he wouldn't drop it otherwise.

“What kind of work? You a world-class fly fisherman or something? Or trying to re-up on ammunition?” This as they were passing a lean-to advertising both
farm-fresh eggs
and major firearms. “Do you want to tell me what you're really doing here?”

Gemma hesitated. “I can't,” she said. It wasn't a lie. She didn't know exactly what she expected to find, only that the universe seemed to be pointing here, toward Haven. A battered sign showed the way to the marina. “Turn right here.”

She kept the window down, straining for a glimpse of Spruce Island, but the buildings kept intruding and the ocean was only visible in brief flashes. Here, at least, the town was not nice, exactly, but nicer: another motel, this one with all its letters intact; diners and bars, stores with colorful lures displayed in the windows, a T-shirt shop
and a restaurant with outdoor seating. In the distance she heard a sound she thought must be the roar of waves, but as they grew closer she made out human voices. A helicopter passed overhead, then another.

The road curved and they were prevented from going any farther by a series of sawhorses in the road and cops grimly gesturing them to turn around. Beyond the roadblock was the marina, and hundreds and hundreds of people gathered there, shouting and chanting and waving homemade signs. Beyond them, the spiky masts of small sailboats bobbing up and down in the water. A column of smoke was visible here, tufting up into the sky from somewhere up the coast and smearing the sun to a strange orange color.

A cop rapped on the driver's-side window, and Pete rolled it down. “You're going to have to turn around,” the cop said. He was suited up in riot gear and carrying three guns that Gemma could see.

“That's where we're going,” Gemma said, gesturing to the angry crowd at the marina, and Pete gave her a look like,
We are?

“Turn around,” the cop said. “Nothing to see here.”

“Except for the huge fireball and all the people going nutty,” Pete said. Gemma elbowed him as the cop leaned down to stare at them through the window. “But otherwise you're right, nothing to see. Nothing at all.” A
second cop was moving toward them, and Pete quickly put the car in reverse. “Have a nice day!” he shouted, even as he was backing haphazardly up the street. The two cops stood there, staring after them, until they'd turned around in the parking lot of a hardware store and started back in the direction they'd come.

“Well,
that
was a lovely day trip,” Pete said as they left the marina behind. “Where to now? Any natural disasters you want to visit? Prison camps? Political riots?”

Gemma spotted a vacant parking lot behind a long line of low-ceilinged storage units. “Pull over here,” she said.

Pete turned to stare at her. “Are you serious?”

“Please. Just do it.” It felt good to give orders, to have a plan, to be out on her own, to do what she wanted without having to beg for permission. Something leapt to life in her chest, a force beyond the guilt and the fear. It was like she'd been living in a cartoon, in two dimensions, her whole life, and had just fought free of the page.

He did, barely making the turn, and rolled to a stop. “Most people think of spring break, they think bikinis, virgin piña coladas, spray tans . . .”

“Not me,” Gemma said, trying to make a joke of it. “I'm allergic to coconut. And I don't even
own
a bikini.”

“Why not?” His eyes were very clear when he turned to look at her. “You'd look great in a bikini.”

Once again, she couldn't tell whether he was making
fun of her. There was an awkward second when Gemma was acutely aware that she was imagining Pete imagining
her
in a bikini, fat rolls and thighs that rubbed together and everything. She wanted to die of embarrassment. Her cheeks felt like someone had put a torch to them. She could hardly stand to look at him, but she had to know whether he was smirking.

He wasn't. He was fiddling nervously with the radio, even though he'd shut off the car ignition. It occurred to Gemma that he was nervous—actually nervous. Because of her.

Germ
Ives. The Frankenstein monster.

“I'll be fine,” she said, and opened the car door. She didn't know where all the tension had come from, but she was desperate to escape it. Her whole body was torch-hot now. Immediately, the faint scent of burning reached her, and beneath it, the smell of swampland—sunbaked mud and belly-up fish and microorganisms wiggling deep in the earth. “Thanks for the ride. Really.”

“You
are
serious,” he said, as though he couldn't believe it. He raised his hands. “All right. Whatever gets your goat.”

“
Whatever gets your goat
?” She shook her head, amazed.

“Yeah. You know. Whatever wets your whistle, gets your rocks off, brings you to your happy place—”

“Pete?” she said. But she couldn't help but smile.
“Know when to stop. Seriously.”

She got out of the car, half expecting him to call her back. But he popped the trunk when she rapped on it and she slung her backpack over her shoulder, still with that weird sense of guilt and fear arm-wrestling with excitement in her stomach. Pete rolled down the window and called out to her before she could walk away.

“You'll call me, right? If you need anything?”

“Is this your fancy way of getting my number?” Gemma asked. Immediately she wanted to chew her own lips off. She sounded like such a dork. And she hated herself for caring, too. He'd given her a ride and that was it. It wasn't like they'd been on a date.

“Technically,” he said, “it's my fancy way of making you
ask
for my number.” He smiled at her all crookedly, with his hair standing up as if it was happy, too. She took his number down and he took hers. “Promise you'll call, all right? So I know you didn't end up, you know, eaten by a crocodile or something?”

She promised she would, although she knew she wouldn't—besides, he was just being polite. She stood there and waved good-bye, feeling a quick squeeze of regret as Pete bumped off onto the road in his ridiculous van. If she was honest, she had to admit she hadn't
hated
hanging out with him. He was annoying, obviously. She didn't like the way that he looked at her sometimes, as
if his eyes were lasers boring straight into her brain. But he was funny, and he was company, and he was, okay, maybe-kind-of cute. She'd never even been alone with a boy before today.

Now she was definitely alone.

She turned back toward the marina. As soon as she began walking, she regretted telling Pete to drop her off so far away. She couldn't approach the marina head on. She had no desire for face time with RoboCop and his buddy. But she figured if she could find a different route onto the beach, she could make her way back along the water to the place where everyone had gathered. Then, she hoped, she'd be able to figure out what had happened at Haven—what Haven
was
, even.

When she could hear the noise of the protest, she turned left and cut through a rutted, salt-worn alley between two boat shops, and then right on a street parallel to the one that led to the marina. Beach grass grew between cracks of the asphalt and a fine layer of sand coated the sidewalks. The houses here were interspersed with smoke shops and dingy bodegas, each of them painted a different pastel but also dusty and dim-looking, like old photographs leached of their luster. After another minute, the buildings fell back and she saw the water flashing behind saw grass the color of spun caramel. A chain-link fence blocked passage down to the beach, and beyond it she saw rusted kayaks
piled in the grass and a scattering of broken beer bottles and cigarettes. She looked behind her: no movement in any of the houses, no signs of life at all except for a skinny cat slinking out from underneath an old Toyota Corolla. Several more helicopters motored by overhead.

She removed her backpack and heaved it over the fence, and then, checking once again to make sure no one was looking, interlaced her fingers in the chain-link and began to climb. The fence swayed dangerously and she had a momentary vision of toppling backward and pulling the whole fence with her. She maneuvered clumsily over the top of the fence and then dropped to the sand, breathing hard now and sweating under the strange smoky sun. She picked up her backpack, realizing as she did that she could now see Spruce Island in the distance—or at least, what she thought must be Spruce Island. About a mile up the coast she could make out a range of heavy dark growth above the horizon. The rest of the island, and whatever Haven was or had been, was blurred by a scrim of smoke and heat.

She picked her way along this untended portion of beach back toward the marina, watching her feet so she didn't trip on any of the junk embedded in the sand. She came to another chain-link fence, this one running down into the water, but luckily found a gate unlatched and didn't have to climb again. Then she was in front of a
battered gray warehouse. She'd seen it at an angle from Pete's car and knew that it extended like a long arm to brace one side of the marina.

And now the swell of voices reached her over the wind. She had to slosh down into the mud to get around the old warehouse, and every time she stepped, a few inches of filthy water swirled up around her shoes. On the far side of the warehouse was the parking lot the police had blocked off, and the crowd had assembled there, some people carrying signs and chanting in unison, some camped out on the asphalt with picnic blankets and binoculars, like they were at a summer concert. A few kids Gemma's age or slightly older were grouped along the edge of a neighboring roof, legs dangling like icicles from the eaves, watching the action. Gemma counted fifty people and at least a dozen cops. What was going on at Haven that it would be so worth protecting? Or destroying?