18
There was still the matter of Alan’s note.
It was just a slip of paper, barely larger than the ones they fold into fortune cookies, but it’d felt heavy in Dan’s pocket since yesterday. In the late afternoon while sitting on the can, Dan rummaged through his pants and found it. He was used to browsing his cell phone on the toilet—sometimes for half an hour, long after he couldn’t feel his legs—but without internet, this would have to do.
Have Dan meet me at the hangar after dark (ha ha).
Dan had missed that first appointment, of course, but Alan would understand. He’d been in prison. Now, though, on the evening before his wedding, Dan’s schedule was free. The smart thing to do would be to forget about the note, go to bed, marry the woman of his dreams tomorrow, and hope Lenny didn’t get them all killed.
But—Alan.
Alan had promised that he and Charles would have Dan and Mara’s backs if they’d have theirs. Dan rubbed his eyes with his palms.
He should’ve washed first. That’s how pink eye gets you.
He finished up—had to push the handle four times to get the water he needed—and opened the bathroom door. He was so startled by Charles that he almost fell back onto the toilet.
“You’re going tonight. Right?” Charles’s arms were folded, and he looked on the verge of tears.
Over the next half hour, Dan, Charles, and Mara paced the room, weighing the pros and cons of the situation, cradling their faces in thought, and combating hopelessness, and pounding their feet in collective childish frustration. Mara didn’t want Dan to go, obviously, not because she was worried about losing her seat on the plane, but because she was worried about losing her husband before he officially earned the title. And Charles understood that, really, he did, and he didn’t want anything to happen to Dan either, but his husband was somewhere out on this terrible island, in the rain, and he’d taken a big risk sending that note, and what if they weren’t feeding him, or if they were abusing him, or, Jesus—what if he just couldn’t get the plane to fly and was no longer useful to them? Charles worked himself into such a tizzy that he snatched his rain slicker and proclaimed he would go himself, but Dan and Mara blocked the door.
“I’ll go,” Dan said. Then, more quietly, “I’ll go.”
Mara said, “Me too.”
Dan scoffed. “Like hell.”
“Danny, you can’t go al—”
“I won’t have my bride looking less than fresh on the day of our wedding. You know how you get when you don’t sleep. The puffy eyes. God, imagine the photos.” He grinned. “I’ll be fine, babe. Let me do this.”
Mara closed her eyes and squeezed his arm, a wordless surrender.
“Think of it like a bachelor party,” he said.
“No strippers.”
“No promises.”
Charles hugged them both at once, his arms like a teddy bear’s, and they stayed like that a moment, stewing quietly in the decision they’d made together.
“You didn’t pack your raincoat,” Mara said.
Charles found Dan’s awkward duvet coat, wrapped him in it. “It’s alright,” he said. “You’ll wear your duvet cover. And then over that, you’ll wear my raincoat. Now, this is a Stutterheim from Bloomingdale’s. Do try to take care of it.” Charles clutched the lapels, shook Dan. “But most importantly, you find my Alan and make sure he’s alright.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.”
Dan kissed Mara. When he pulled away, her eyes were glassy. She smiled and said, “This isn’t something a miserable dick would do.”
Rain blanketed everything. Sheets of it cut across the courtyard like God was trying to wipe the world clean, start over. They shattered against the resort buildings in a steady roar. It was miserable—Dan already felt his boxers taking on water—but he also felt insulated by it. The guards wouldn’t be out in this. Nobody with any sense would be out in this. Once the cold seeped into his bones, which happened very quickly, he was able to turn his mind from it. Like jumping into a swimming pool in February, he waded through the water until he became numb.
He followed the murky resort lamps toward Building C, tripped over a cabana that had been destroyed in the riot. The resort stunk. Had it always smelled this bad? It was like a mixture of sewage and body odor, stale air and recycled water. Not even the rain smelled fresh.
Dan made it to the parking lot, past the bus where he, Lenny, and Alan had handcuffed that young guard. Dan sidled up to the bus, tried to pull Charles’s coat further shut. Heavy branches had been blown in by the storm, a golf cart turned over. He had a choice to make now—take the road to the west where they’d bussed guests from the airstrip and risk getting caught by a patrol, or head back into those damn woods. They loomed like a black hole at the north end of the lot.
His choice was made for him though, when from the western road, a pair of headlights sliced open the rain. The hood was blown from his head as Dan rushed forward into the woods, but branches from the trees grabbed hold and shoved him back out. He landed on his ass in the mud and groaned because, you know, fuck this, but then was back on his feet and trudging again. He broke through the forest barrier just as the Jeep lights scanned the parking lot, and the trees closed up behind him, swallowing him inside.
It was pitch-black.
He didn’t use his cell phone light, not yet, he was too close to the resort, and he needed to conserve battery, so he walked like a blind man with his hands in front of him, attempting desperately to stay in a straight line while zigzagging around trees. The airstrip was straight north, that much he knew. Any variation from the path, and he’d end up God knows where, probably off the edge of one of those rocky cliffs that insulated the island.
When he felt adequately deep into the black hole, Dan turned on his cell phone light, but it hardly helped. He watched his tennis shoes sink into the earth with each step, could barely make out the bark of a tree before he slammed nose-first into it. He felt horribly ill-equipped to navigate this maze. He needed a real man, someone with a sense of direction built in, he needed an Alan or a Lenny, because he already felt turned around. He walked for thirty straight minutes—or maybe forty-five—before panic set in. Twice he decided to go back to where he came from, recalibrate, but he didn’t even know where that was anymore, and then he tripped over a fallen tree and he landed hard in a puddle and his ribs hollered and his phone skipped ahead like a lightning bug and then extinguished. He was plunged into nothingness, his mouth and eyes filling with rain, Charles’s Bloomingdale’s coat definitely ruined. He scampered forward on his hands and knees into a tree, then into something that felt like a rock, and then into another one.
He desperately patted the ground for his phone. His heart threatened to tunnel through his chest like a freight train, his hands trembled like pebbles against the track. What was he thinking, coming out here alone? Fake it till you make it works up until the point you don’t make it, up until the point you inexplicably drown in the woods of a Bahamian island several days after the sun explodes.
He closed his eyes—not that it made much of a difference—took two deep breaths, straightened the raincoat, and willed his shit together. It was just rain. They were just trees. “I’m a grown-ass man,” he said aloud to the darkness. I’m a man. I got this. I got this. I got this. I got—
My phone!
Dan dove for a sliver of light inside a patch of slick growth. He collided with another rock—Jesus, had he walked to Stonehenge?—and snatched his phone from the ground, hugged it, kissed it, apologized to it. He turned the flashlight away from him, to get a better look at these rocks, but they weren’t rocks. They were tombstones, and Dan—or the wind—had knocked one over. He ran his light and his fingers over the inscription.
JANE
1986
What? It made no sense. Dan scurried backward, his back slammed into a tree at the edge of the clearing, and he took in the scene as best he could under all that water. Seven graves in two uneven rows, three of the tombstones upended, ripped from the earth, a graveyard in the middle of the woods. Why a graveyard in the middle of the woods? Deaths in 1986? The resort only opened a week ago.
For a split second, the sun reignited in Dan’s world, he could see everything as if it were daytime, but then his insides shook like a paint mixer, and there was a sickening crack above him, the tree he was against had been struck by lightning, and shards of it poured down as he tried desperately to shield himself. He stumbled forward, over the graves, faintly aware of the warm urine on his leg mixed with all that cold rain. Then there was another light, from a more permanent source though, and Dan fell face-first into it, washed himself in it.
A hand was under his arm now, it hoisted him to his feet, and a voice navigated the wind.
“Sir. Sir! We must leave these woods at once!”
Dan nodded—he would’ve followed Mussolini if he knew the route out of here—and he shined his cell phone up at the man. He had dimpled skin and tiny black eyes, and he carried himself like a man who knew things, like it was his job to know things.
It was Dr. Terry Shae, the man who lived in the island’s observatory, and Dan could’ve kissed him.