Replica (Replica #1)(79)
Gemma keystroked through a few pages, most of them decorated with grinning skulls or licks of flame and peppered with biblical verse and lots of exclamation points. “She thinks they’re raising people from the dead at Haven?” she asked.
“She thought that,” he said quietly. “If she really is responsible for what happened, if she did turn herself into one gigantic IED, like they’re saying, she’s scattered across the marshes by now.” He shook his head, and Gemma couldn’t help but think: another person dead. Another person dead because of Haven. Nurse M, Jake’s father, and now this woman, Angel Fire. “She must have timed her message to go out to a bunch of people at once. Even the news channels got wind of it, and they’re always the last to know anything.” He closed the laptop and slipped it into his backpack—which was, predictably, black—and stood up. “So? Are you ready?”
“I guess so.” She knew it was stupid to be freaked out by some nutter’s theory about Haven and its weird science. But she couldn’t shake the image of people staggering through the darkness of the marshes, reaching for her with clammy hands.
“You need to be sure sure.” Jake stood up. “We might get arrested.”
Suddenly, though, Gemma felt as if all those Sour Patch Kids were nails trying to claw back out of her throat. She had the sense that being arrested would be the best thing that might happen to them.
Jake had told her that several weeks after his father died, he’d woken up in the middle of the night, certain that someone had just shaken him awake. But he was in the room alone. Still, every few minutes he felt a phantom pressure on his shoulder, as though someone was tapping him.
“I know what you’re probably thinking,” he’d said, a little too forcefully. “But I don’t believe in things like that. Spirits, voices from the grave. I’m not like my dad.”
Still, the impression of a presence wouldn’t leave him. Every few minutes, there was a tap-tap on his shoulder. So he had stood up, walked down the stairs, and walked straight out of the house.
His mom had just returned from Las Vegas, where she’d been living doing God knows what, essentially refusing to recognize the existence of her son except in the occasional birthday message, usually an email sent a few days late. Within a month, she would be gone again, and Jake would move in with his dad’s sister, a widow who’d never had children and never wanted any.
Guided by a certainty he could never afterward explain, he had walked the five miles to the Wahlee basin campsite where he and his father had set off so many times together, and found a rowboat pitted with rust, likely left there by a local fisherman. The whole time, he said, he could feel an occasional tap on his shoulder, like a kind of Morse code, telling him to go on.
He had no compass. No water. No supplies. And yet somehow that night, alone in the marshes, he knew exactly where to go.
Dawn was breaking by the time he saw a bank of spruce and knew he’d reached Spruce Island. The institute was hidden from view. He realized he must have rowed all the way around to the west side of the island, which was still undeveloped. The security was lighter, too. There was a fence, and guard towers, but at dawn they were abandoned.
And still the finger kept tap-tap-tapping on his shoulder.
He pulled his boat up onto shore, less than ten feet away from a downed tree that had taken down a four-foot section of the fence.
He was on the island less than ten minutes before he was caught, thrown to the ground by military-style guards, frog-marched across the island and out to the dock, where police were already waiting for him. He never went near the main buildings, had only the briefest glimpse of the white-walled institute and the people inside it.
But it was enough.
She looked around the room, wishing she didn’t have the melodramatic feeling she was seeing it for the last time. Even though it had been her idea to try and get to Haven tonight—or maybe because it had been—she felt she couldn’t back out now. “I’m sure,” she said, grabbing the only sweatshirt she’d brought. She wished it weren’t bright pink.
Jake was obviously thinking the same thing, because he frowned. “Take this.” He wrestled a black Windbreaker out of his backpack. It was a warm night, but the mosquitoes on the marshes, he told her, were killer.
Jake’s car was so old it seemed predominantly composed of duct tape and string. “Sorry,” he said, with an apologetic smile that made Gemma’s heart purr. “But at least you’re getting door-to-door service.”
The car rattled so hard when he accelerated she was sure she was about to be expelled from her seat, that the car would just roll over and give up, panting, like a tired dog, but she didn’t want to complain, and sat there white-knuckling her seat so hard her fingers ached.
“Just a few more miles,” Jake said. They’d looped around to approach Wahlee from the north, on one of the few roads that gave access to the nature reserve, and the bouncing of the headlights made Gemma feel seasick.
Miraculously, they made it without incident, although Gemma could have sworn that the car gave a relieved sigh when Jake cut the engine. Stepping outside, she was immediately overwhelmed by the sound of the tree frogs. They were so loud and so uniform they seemed like a single entity, like the heartbeat of the world rising and falling. Even here, she thought she detected a faint smell of smoke.