Replica (Replica #1)(71)
“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?
She slipped unnoticed into the crowd.
She passed a man wearing a plastic Viking helmet that had been outfitted with different antennae and metal coils. He kept pacing in circles, gesturing to an invisible audience and muttering, and when he caught Gemma looking, he whirled on her and continued his monologue even more loudly “—and why we couldn’t drink any of the water when we were stationed in Nasiriyah, fear of poison, of course some must have gone in the food supply and that’s why the doctor says holes in my brain—”
She turned quickly away. Several people wore gas masks that made them look like the bad guys in a horror film, or like enormous insects, which made it even weirder that they were standing around in jeans and beat-up Top-Siders, gazing out over the water. The protesters, she saw, were calling for Haven’s shuttering. Our Land, Our Health, Our Right, read one sign, and another said, Keep Your Chemicals Out of My Backyard. But among them were signs with other, stranger messages: signs that referenced Roswell and Big Brother and zombies, and several posters screaming about the dangers of hell. One girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve was holding a colorful handmade sign with bubbly letters: And Cast Ye the Unprofitable Servant into Outer Darkness.