7
Lilyanna said the 9 p.m. curfew was for the good of everyone. At 8:59 she cut the power, and the resort plunged into darkness as if dipped in ink.
People screamed.
The island was running on generators now that solar power had gone kaput, Lilyanna explained, and why waste precious fuel lighting common areas or keeping the air-conditioning running when it was a comfortable sixty degrees. That might’ve been sound reasoning, maybe, if it weren’t for Building A shining like a casino long after the men with pistols motioned guests of B and C toward their gloomy rooms. Dan thought surely this was it, that Lilyanna had pushed too hard, too fast, that guests would rise up and end the regime spreading across the island like a weed.
But at 9:01 it was quiet.
Dan’s phone had good battery life because he always closed his background apps, so he turned on the flashlight and slid it under a water bottle as a makeshift lamp. After pulling the shades, Mara unlatched the interior door that connected Alan and Charles’s room to theirs.
“I just—” Charles’s jowls trembled as he shook his head. “I just don’t think it’s a good idea, y’all. I won’t bury you next to that boy in the garden.”
“He’s right,” Mara said, pacing because she couldn’t sit still when she was thinking. “I understand why you’d want to check out the airstrip, Alan, and that was a good idea before Building A took over and shot someone. But now…” She covered her trembling bottom lip with a hand.
Alan’s eyes appealed to Dan, who shrugged, feigning bravery. Charles sat in the vanity chair and tore open a Snickers. “Ugh, Lilyanna. Like, pick a name, sweetie. Lily or Anna? They’re both horrible. Struttin’ around with two names like you deserve more than the rest of us.”
Alan said, “Your mother’s name was Rosemary.”
Charles’s head whipped around. “And she was a saint. She deserved twenty names, that woman, she wasn’t a stack of bones selling diet pills to fat Midwesterners like Li-ly-an-na. ” He slammed the candy on the vanity. “I can’t think about that woman.”
“Okay.”
“I hate her whole face.”
“Okay.”
Charles huffed and meticulously separated the candy bar into fours, passing a piece to each of them. Dan would’ve usually preferred an endpiece, but he popped it in anyway. “We’re already here?” he asked, working through the nougat. “Rationing candy bars?”
“The fuckers emptied the vending machines this afternoon,” Alan said. “What do you bet they turn off the water next, start rationing that?”
Huh. Dan stepped into the bathroom, plugged the bath drain, and filled the tub. He’d seen Viggo Mortensen do that in The Road . When he stepped back into the bedroom, Alan looked impressed and shuffled off to do the same.
Alan, a man, impressed with something Dan thought of. He felt taller.
“Building C doesn’t have separate bathtubs,” Mara said. “I remember looking at the pictures when we were deciding where to stay.”
“We were never going to stay in Building C,” Dan clarified. Charles waved him off, like, Of course. We know what type of people you are.
“Fuck Building C,” Alan said, reemerging. “Not our problem.”
Mara scoffed. “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”
“There’s probably a thousand people on this island. Not even a rounding error in total U.S. population. No one back home’s thinking about us. Those planes aren’t coming.”
“We don’t know that,” Mara said. “But even if it’s true, that just means everyone has to work together, Alan. If Building C needs our—”
“You’re not getting me,” Alan snapped, probably sharper than he’d intended.
Charles scolded him.
Alan took another deep breath, silently apologizing.
“Help me get you,” Mara said.
Damn. Help me get you . With a thousand years to workshop different responses to someone snapping at him, Dan never would’ve thought of that. She could be dramatic sometimes, yeah, but Mara was never flippant about people’s feelings, even when they were flippant about hers.
“What I mean,” Alan said, “is that Dan’s speech earlier was nice. But wrong.” He cocked his head at Dan. “No offense.”
Dan shrugged that off. He wasn’t sure he believed what he had said either. He just didn’t want anyone else to get shot.
Alan continued. “We’re on our own. And when I say we , I don’t mean the whole island. I mean the people splitting this Snickers.” He ate his piece. “Charles and I have your backs if you have ours. But we can’t save everyone.”
“What if we can?” Mara asked.
“We can’t. And believe me.” He twirled his finger. “Conversations just like this are happening all over.”
Dan stepped in. “Look, none of this means anything if there’s no way out of here.” He pushed his fear as far down as it would fit. “Alan and I are doing this. Tonight.” He said the next part before Mara could object. “We’ll be careful.”
“So, what?” Charles said, his arms crossed across his ample chest, his face a broken sneer. “You think y’all’re just gonna find a 5 with drink service and Wi-Fi parked on a runway they conveniently forgot about? Oh, woops, you’re telling me the very thing we needed to escape this postapocalyptic hellscape was sitting in the one place it could conceivably be this entire time? How silly of us not to check! Okay, yeah, you boys go. Wonderful idea. Go get torn to pieces like poor Julio, you macho a-holes.”
Lenny Fava had seen Bruce Springsteen in concert at least four times. He didn’t tell Dan that, not yet, but Dan was sure of it from the second he opened his mouth. Dan tried not to stereotype anyone—he was a middle-class white guy who blasted Matchbox Twenty in his Dodge Caliber, so who was he to talk—but Lenny Fava was North Jersey personified. Even in the nearly pitch-black parking lot north of Building C, Dan could make out the gold cross under his Affliction tank top, the barbwire tattoo etched into his bicep. He was shaped like a meatball and probably ordered meatball subs at his favorite diner next to some parkway exit, and his wife was Connie or Coleen or Vickie. But if Dan was sure of any of these things, it was that Lenny loved The Boss. No doubt about it. Lenny Fava was Born to Run.
Cwoffee was the word that gave him away. When Alan and Dan, panting from their sprint through the bushes and past the Main Building, plopped down behind the tire of a bus in the resort parking lot, Lenny offered them two piping hot cups of cwoffee. It was one of the few beverages guests still had in their rooms. Dan refused—he didn’t drink the stuff—but Alan gulped it down without any regard for its temperature, then snatched the cup meant for Dan.
“This is Lenny,” Alan whispered, peering past their shoulders for any sign of guards. “He’s from C. We met at the Maize Pool before everything.”
“How you doin’?” Lenny’s handshake was like a vise grip. “We was doin’ the limbo out there. You wouldn’t believe how low this guy’s boyfriend can get, Jesus Christ. Never seen a guy that flexible.”
“Husband,” Alan said, his breath returning.
“Right, yeah, husband. I still forget sometimes you guys can do that now.”
Dan nodded at Lenny. Alan hadn’t mentioned meeting anyone else during this covert operation. What happened to looking out for themselves? And “Fuck Building C”?
“Airstrip’s about a mile through there,” Lenny said, pointing at the dense woods hugging the north side of the parking lot. The trees danced and screeched as if alive. “We could take the road they used to bus us here, but they’re still lighting it. Better chance they’d spot us. Hope you two ain’t scared of the dark.”
“What about east along the beach?” Dan offered. “Circle around the top of the island and make our way in?”
“They’re all over the beach. And that Shae guy’s place is northeast, that’s fenced off real good. We’d have to scale some cliffs if we came at the airstrip from the north. Don’t know about you two, but I don’t scale fuckin’ cliffs.” That looked accurate. Dan placed Lenny in his early sixties at least, though the salt-and-pepper stubble on his face betrayed the jet-black hair up top. Looked like he was wearing a motorcycle helmet.
Dan asked, “How do you know so much about the island?”
“Found some maps in the boiler room of our building, down near the staff quarters. They’re old. From like, the fifties, so none of this Tizoc resort shit’s on ’em. The observatory either, but I got a feel for things. I was a surveyor back in the eighties, so I know maps.”
There it was, the reason Alan invited him along. Alan finished the second cup of coffee, crushed and tossed it on the asphalt. “Through the woods then.”
Through the woods, Dan thought, and just as he was about to stand to assist his geriatric companions, a flashlight beam slinked along the windows of the bus. Dan felt his heart in his throat—it tasted like the middle of a Snickers—and Alan snatched his shirt and yanked him under the bus, out of sight. Lenny, astonishingly, wasn’t as nimble, so they both grabbed hold of one of his hairy wrists and tugged. He grunted as his stomach scraped along the tarmac. Dan hoped whoever owned that flashlight was hard of hearing. And seeing. Smelling too, because someone had forgotten deodorant.
Alan hissed, “Fuck,” as the flashlight steadied on Lenny’s flailing legs. Lenny’s face sunk into the tar as he began the laborious process of backing out. Dan crawled out next, standing with his hands above his head, followed by Alan, snarling like a trapped raccoon.
Caught already. Dead already. They hadn’t even stepped foot off the property. Way to go, Danny boy. Stopped before making even an ounce of progress. Typical.
The guard clicked off his light. Now, the word guard implies some sort of sentinel, a barrel-chested defender of life and property, and this wasn’t that. It was a kid playing dress-up, a boy with a pistol he could barely wrap his hand around. A pathetic attempt at a mustache quivered above his lip. When Alan got a good look at him, he relaxed.
“What—what are you doing out here?” the kid said. He couldn’t have been older than Julio. When no one said anything, he shook the gun at Lenny. “Answer me!”
“Listen, kid,” Lenny said, his scraped palms pointed outward, “how much is that bitch paying you? You don’t want to—”
“We were told to shoot trespassers on sight,” the boy confessed, like he couldn’t process it either.
“On sight?” Dan said. His tongue was sandpaper. “Jesus Christ. Lilyanna said that?”
“Hey, hands up!” He wildly swung the gun at Alan, whose hands shot back up.
Dan took a baby step forward. “Listen. Hey, man, listen. What’s your name?”
“David,” David said. The gun was in Dan’s face now, and Dan was glad he didn’t drink coffee because it’d be trickling down the side of his leg.
“David. Okay, David. I can tell you don’t want to shoot us. Do you know why we’re out here?”
“The food. You want to steal the food back.”
“No! No, no way. David, we were—well, you know how you found us under the bus ?” Dan was stalling, he couldn’t think of a reason they’d be out. Why do people leave their hotel rooms at night? To get ice? “Well, man, it’s a funny story.” Dan laughed and put a hand on Lenny’s shoulder, who laughed like, heh, yeah, heh. “What we were actually doing, David, and trust me, you’re going to love this one, because you look to me like a guy with a sense of humor. Doesn’t he? Actually, you know who you really look like? I do. Doesn’t he look like that comedian? Lenny, who does he—”
“Carrot Top,” Lenny said.
Dan closed his eyes. Come on, Lenny. The kid’s Bahamian.
“No!” Dan said. “No, that’s not it. Well, anyway, David, like I said—”
Alan lunged forward and punched David in the jaw. His whole body buckled, just like in the movies, like Henchman #2 stumbling across James Bond on his way to the death ray. But David wasn’t Henchman #2, he was David, and Dan felt a little sorry for him when his head bounced off the blacktop.
Alan snatched the pistol and struck David one more time. Dan pushed him away.
“Christ, Alan. I think you got him.”
Alan checked David’s pulse. “He’ll be fine. Kid was going to shoot us. Take his radio.”
After stripping him of his equipment, they carried David into the bus, placed him in the driver’s seat, and handcuffed him to the steering wheel. Dan adjusted the driver’s seat all the way up and positioned David’s head delicately between the spokes.
Waking up with a sore neck is the worst.