30
“Oh baby, that feels good.”
Mara warmed her hands over Dr. Shae’s fireplace. Dan kicked off his shoes and peeled the wet socks from his feet. His toes danced next to the flames. “Ahh.”
Dr. Shae wasn’t there, which was odd, because who lights a fire and leaves? His radio was gone too. Dan didn’t put much thought into it. The heat was too good. Wrap me in heat, he thought. Roll me in it like it’s a warm tortilla and I’m spicy chorizo.
They sat on the splintered wood floor awhile, the flames doing most of the talking. Mara propped her head on Dan’s shoulder. When they had warmed up completely, she said, “Tell me she made it.”
Dan scoffed without thinking, the way he instinctively did when someone said something absurd. There was no way Gloria made it. No way. She was slower than them. Older. She smoked like wildfire. And she was heading in a direction with virtually no cover. Dan hated it, he hated everything that’d happened in the past week, but there was no point lying about it. She hadn’t made it.
Mara blinked up at him.
“She made it,” Dan said. “Definitely.”
Her head returned to his shoulder. “Okay. Now what?”
“Well,” Dan said, glancing into the kitchen, “he had Bagel Bites last time.”
“I’m talking about this,” Mara said, digging around for the Polaroid. “Where did you find this?”
Dan helped Mara off the last rung of the ladder and into the stagnant pitch-black observatory. He inched along the metal walls and felt for a light switch.
“Last time I was here, this place was a wreck,” he said. “Hurricane Rico. Shit. My phone’s dead.”
“I’ve got an idea,” Mara said, and she disconnected from Dan and scampered down the ladder in the dark. She returned with a candle.
“Ooh, old school,” Dan said. “Nice.”
They found the switch in no time, and soon the sterile lights of the observatory snapped on in quadrants. The room looked nothing like the conclusion of Dan’s previous visit—Shae had put everything back in its place, filed every loose sheet of paper, computers humming again. This was a proper observatory. The pearl white ceiling stretched dozens of feet into the air and was rounded on top, like being inside R2-D2. Dan spun in place with his hands out because the room was alive with the sound of science.
Mara knocked on the telescope. It bonged like a church bell. “It’s incredible,” she said. “Random, but incredible.”
“Right here,” Dan said. “I was behind this filing cabinet. The picture slid underneath as Rico tore the place apart.” He ran his finger down the cabinet that saved his life. Its drawers were labeled by decade: 1960–1970, 1971–1980, 1981–1990. And so on, all the way to present day.
“What do you think these monitors are for?” Mara asked. They were CRT box monitors, nine of them, stacked in a three-by-three grid. Mara searched for a console, some way to turn them on.
“ Mario Kart would be incredible in here,” Dan said. Mara stared at him. She wanted a real answer. “I don’t know. Maybe to record cool space shit. Exoplanets.”
“Exoplanets?”
“Planets orbiting stars or something. Hey, what year did Jane MacCallum go missing? Eighties, right?”
“Early eighties.” Mara joined Dan at the filing cabinet. “Dude. I’m so nervous. Are we about to solve a Disappearance Report ? What if she secretly left her husband to come work for Dr. Shae? What if they were in love? Oh my God, Danny, what if it was a torrid love affair?” She squealed and squeezed Dan’s love handles.
Dan took one last look at the photograph. At Jane. “We’re sure this is her?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Because I’m about to open this cabinet. And Shae was actually pretty cool to me. He saved my life.” His hand fell from the drawer handle. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”
“What? Hey, maybe we’ll get arrested and extradited back to the states.” She pushed past Dan and yanked the drawer herself. The files were so tightly packed that some sprung out like dough from a biscuit can.
“MacCallum…” Mara said, fingering through. “MacCallum…MacCallum…” She gasped and looked up. “Oh my God, Danny. She has a file.”
“You’re lying.”
“I’m not.”
Dan’s heart pounded. This is actually happening?
Mara tugged it free. “I hold in my hand the fate of Jane MacCallum, Disappearance Report season two, episode four.” She lowered her voice, imitated the show’s histrionic narrator. “It was an overcast, some might say contemplative April day when Jane MacCallum, thirty-one, took off from Homestead Air Reserve on the southern tip of Florida. But did those cloudy skies warn of something more sinister? Something perhaps more—”
“Get to it!” Dan snatched the file from her. “Christ, this thing is thick.” He placed it on the nearby desk and began flipping. “Shit. And detailed. Medical records, education, her time in the Navy… Hey, look, she received a medal. Good for her.” There were photographs and test scores…a report card from the sixth grade…scanned pages from a teenage diary.
What the hell?
“She was beautiful,” Mara said. “But this is creepy. This is way more than an employee file.”
It was creepy. Dental records, fingerprints, phone logs, credit card receipts. Information about a…miscarriage? She’d miscarried in ’79. Dan felt gross reading it. This wasn’t his business.
Why was it Dr. Shae’s business?
“What about her time here?” Mara asked. “Anything about her time here?”
Dan flicked to the end. “Nothing. It stops in ’82.”
Mara returned to the cabinet, scanned a few more folders. “Danny. There’s a second file.” It was even thicker than the first. Mara plopped it on the desk, and a giant thud echoed through the dome.
Dan read aloud from the first page, some kind of report. “ Jane MacCallum, test subject NA-31220, acquired on April twenty-third, 1982— ”
“Test subject?”
“— recovered from plane wreckage incited by optical amplification interference .” Dan slammed the folder shut and stared up at Mara, his eyes saucers. His stomach barrel-rolled as he pushed the file away. “Fuck this.”
“No, Danny, we can’t stop now. What’s optical amplification?” Mara leaned over his shoulder, read further. “ Subject is recovering in medical ward, wounds superficial … Yeah, yeah, okay… Upon recovery, subject will be released… Will assess mental, emotional, metabolic response to controlled stimuli on ongoing basis … What the hell is this? What was he doing to her?”
“I don’t know. I have no idea.” He had some idea, an insane idea, but saying that idea aloud would mean introducing it to the universe. Better to keep that thought inside, in his brain’s filing cabinet, for all of eternity.
We should leave, he thought, forget all this. Crawl back to the fireplace where things made sense. Fire good. Flame warm. Feel nice.
But Mara, never wary of introducing her thoughts to the universe, flipped through a few more pages and then declared what they both knew. “Jane wasn’t an employee. She was an experiment .”
Dan paced the observatory, squeezed his temples. How could the sun exploding be the second-weirdest thing to happen this vacation? He suddenly stopped in his tracks, a thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. He spun to Mara. “I think she’s buried here,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s a small graveyard in the woods not far from here. I found it the night of the storm. I asked Shae about it, he made it sound like employees of ShaeTech were buried here. Like, really devoted employees who loved…exoplanet work or whatever. I read some names on the headstones. One of them might’ve said”—Dan racked his brain, knocked against his skull to wake it up—“I think one of them might’ve said Jane .”
“What the hell is ShaeTech?”
“Shae’s father’s company. Aerospace. They made bonnets.”
“Bonnets?”
“Ballutes? Something. I don’t know. A parachute thing. But they had a research division too that was on this island, this observatory, and Dr. Shae ran that.”
“And studied exoplanets.”
“Right.”
Mara, still nose-deep in the file, gasped. She held a new Polaroid in her quivering hand. It was a photo of a cabin and observatory—the very structure they were inside—nestled in a thick bed of snow. Underneath, a caption.
July 14, 1983—our first snow!
“Snow,” Mara said. “In the Bahamas. In July .”
“What the fuck?” Dan said. He paused, really put some oomph into the next one: “What the fuck ?”
His brain was melting, dripping down his throat, evaporating against his heart like water on a hot pan. He closed his eyes for a moment, made fists, clenched his teeth. “The file cabinet. Check this year.”
Mara was on her knees in a flash, tearing open the bottom drawer. It was packed with files too, smaller files, but hundreds of them. Dan couldn’t believe what he was about to say.
“Check for our names.”
Mara glared at him. “What?”
“Check for our names.”
Mara gasped. Again. She was a great gasper. If Fitzgerald wrote a book about her, it’d be titled The Great Gaspy , because there was something very haunting about a Mara gasp, something bone-chilling. She held a hand to her mouth and pulled out a file.
“ Foster, Dan ,” she read. She flicked the file across the floor to him, dove back into the cabinet. She screeched, tugged out another. “ Nichols, Mara . Danny. What is this?”
Dan sat on the floor, took a deep breath, and opened his file. His passport photo. Screenshots of his Facebook, his Instagram, his LinkedIn. God, he really needed to update his LinkedIn—it still listed him as a busboy at Longhorn Steakhouse. The next page was a Google Earth photo of his apartment.
Mara scooched backward across the floor till she was next to him. “Danny. He’s got—oh my God. He’s got my mom’s name and Raveena’s and pictures of her house. He’s got—this is my old MySpace , Danny. I don’t even know how to get on this!”
Dan glanced over. “You had pink highlights? Is that a lip ring?”
“There was a Hot Topic phase in high school. Danny, he knows where I work. Look at this form. ER nurse, St. Francis Hospital, Memphis, Tennessee . My car’s registration. My degree, my masters, the award I got from AACN. This is everything, Danny. This—it’s everything.” Mara returned to the cabinet.
Dan’s file was noticeably thinner than hers. “Well,” he said, “it’s not all accurate. Says here I’m five foot ten.”
“Babe. You are five ten.”
“What? I’m six foot even.”
“No, you’re not. I told Dr. Wallace to say you were six foot because I knew what it meant to you.”
“ Excuse me? ”
“You didn’t think it was strange you hit a growth spurt at twenty-seven?”
Dan scratched his head. “A little, but we took that yoga class at the Y. And I told you I felt something pop, remember? I thought—”
“Hey, Rico’s got a file too.”
Dan made a face like, Ooh, gimme , and Mara slid it over. Dan dove right in.
Mara stood, marched over to the table. “Jane’s file is different than ours. Observations of her time on the island, relationships, how she fed herself. He caught her, Danny, he kept her here, and he observed her. He studied her every move.” She shuffled through more pages. “It was before the resort, when the island was mostly wilderness. There were others too. He studied them like rats.”
That was interesting, but Dan was absolutely loving Rico’s file. “He’s from Albuquerque. He’s been to prison. Shocker. His full name’s Federico. I guess that makes sense, but I hadn’t thought about it. Damn, there’s some really good stuff in here. Mara—oh, my God.” Dan laughed victoriously and slapped the paper. “You’re not going to believe this. He—”
Mara snatched the file from Dan and tossed it away. “Forget Rico. What the hell was going on on this island?”
Dan spotted a remote control on another desk near the telescope. He aimed it at the grid of monitors. They clicked on one by one.
“You get all those gasps out of your system?” he asked, swiveling Mara’s head to the screens. She hadn’t.
The monitors showed every conceivable angle of the resort on rotation. Building A lobby. B. C. Each of the pool decks, where guests sporadically exchanged fire with guards. Four views of the beach. The garden. The Great Lawn, its amphitheater. Dan pressed the channel-up button. Jesus. Rooms now. Guests’ private rooms . There was a couple cowering in the corner behind their bed in Building C. A man frantically packing a bag in Building A. In another A room, an old man nonchalantly eating grapes from the vine, butt naked.
“I’m going to be sick,” Mara said.
“There must be hundreds of cameras here,” Dan whispered.
“That means…” Something caught her throat. “That means he saw us…”
“There are so many rooms,” Dan said. “You don’t know that he was watching ours. Or when.” It was hardly reassuring. If a lonely old man wanted to watch anyone in the shower, or in bed, or in her bikini, it was Mara. Rage twisted Dan’s face. Blood pooled in his cheeks. Exoplanets, my ass. I’m going to make him an ex…o…person. Dan couldn’t think of any good threats. He was too furious.
Mara shrieked as a cabin door slammed open below them. She slinked behind Dan, who snatched the remote and clicked off the monitors. Together he and Mara walked backward, positioning themselves as far from the observatory ladder as possible. Mara tapped Dan’s shoulder and pointed to his waistband.
Right. The gun.
He aimed it at the ladder the same way he’d seen people in movies aim guns. He waited. As each metallic rung of the ladder cried out, Mara’s grip on his back strengthened. Dan realized too late that he didn’t know if the gun had a safety.
He was the lowest form of man. Truly.
Dr. Shae’s bald head popped into view like a gopher’s. He smiled warmly at them, smiled at the gun, waved it off like, Oh, of course you’re upset, but this is a big misunderstanding, and either way I’m happy to see you. He pulled himself into the room. He was wearing a lab coat, which wasn’t helping the mad scientist vibe, and he looked less groomed than usual. The hair on the sides of his head poked out like it was trying to escape from his brain, and his beady little eyes had grown three sizes.
“The tunnel?” Shae asked.
“The tunnel,” Dan confirmed.
“Well, I believe congratulations are in order.” Shae brushed snow from his coat. He raised his hands and clapped them together above his head. “Marriage! That is wonderful. I have good bourbon downstairs. A drink, perhaps?”
Mara, who must’ve sensed Shae was physically harmless, stomped out from behind Dan. She pointed at him, and words spewed from her like lava. “You’ve got a lot to answer for.”
Shae nodded at Dan. “She is lovely. Truly. Congratulations again.”
“But you knew that,” Dan said, the gun steady.
Mara said, “We’ve seen the files. We’ve seen the cameras. You’ve been spying on us!”
Shae sighed and considered Mara like he would an approaching rain cloud, an inconvenience. He glanced at the piles of loose paper on the ground, noted the new location of the television remote. He put his hands up like, You got me. There was no use lying anymore.
“Not you ,” he said. “Not specifically. And spying is such a sharp word, no?” He tapped the tips of his fingers together. “ Studying is softer. More appropriate too, in this case. But—yes. Still upsetting, judging by your faces. To be fair, you were not supposed to find out like this.”
“ Talk ,” Dan said. “ShaeTech. The truth this time.” He was beginning to understand the appeal of guns. He felt powerful. Felt like he could take on the world with this thing.
“Please, Mr. Foster, could you lower that? We can talk, but please. No need for that. You are not Rico Flores.”
“You gonna tell us the truth?”
“Yes.”
Dan placed the gun in his waistband but kept a cautious hand on it. “Go. You weren’t looking for exoplanets, were you?”
Shae inhaled deeply. “We were at first, absolutely. The research division of ShaeTech. See, my father never cared for my research. He was more interested in profitable ventures. I think he was ecstatic when I told him we should purchase the island. If it would keep me out of his office every day, away from the board, his shareholder meetings, he would pay any price.”
“Oh, boo-hoo,” Mara said.
“Background, Mrs. Foster, not for sympathy.”
“Okay,” Dan said. “Don’t need your life story, Doc. Jane MacCallum.”
At mention of her name, Shae’s face turned the color of milk.
“Yeah,” Mara said. “We know about Jane.”
“Can I sit?” Shae asked. He looked like he might faint. “Please. I would just like to—if I could sit. This is quite a lot for me, you see, it’s been decades.”
Mara scoffed. “Quite a lot for you ?”
Dan kicked Shae a desk chair. He sat.
“It started with exoplanets, Mr. Foster. Truly.” He unrolled a chart on the wall. There were planets—some more detailed than others—in various colors, purples and greens and reds and blues. “There are thousands of them. Thousands of planets that could potentially harbor life. Correction: thousands confirmed . There are millions more. We spent years searching for them, discovering them, naming them.”
“Okay,” Dan said.
“But it was akin to stamp collecting, Mr. Foster. What good does mere discovery do? Who cares if we can proclaim that a distant speck of light in an endless universe may support life somehow, someday?”
“Sounds important to me,” Dan said.
“Me too,” Mara said.
“That is because you have been programmed to ask the wrong questions.”
“I didn’t ask a question,” Dan said.
“Me either,” Mara said.
“As human beings, we want to look up—no—we need to look up, to see what lies beyond, to gaze into the great unknown and turn it into the known. It is our ego, Mr. Foster, our great hubris, to seek understanding of the universe when we have yet to even truly understand our own planet—to understand ourselves.”
“Feel like we’re a bit off track here,” Dan said.
“It is a wonder our species still exists. Do you know how close we have come to the brink of extinction? From famine? Disease? War? We are but a cosmic blip on the windshield of time, and one day she will turn on her wipers and there will nary be a trace of us. Do you understand?”
Shae stood, his strength returning. He paced. “And we talk of inhabiting other planets.” He chuckled. “Talk of sending groups of people to populate a point in the sky. To farm the land, to build shelter, construct a society. It’s poppycock.”
Who says poppycock ?
“We’ve fought wars for thousands of years over claims on mountains of sand. We brutalize one another over books of fables!”
He waltzed toward them, buttoned the front of his coat like he was receiving the Nobel Prize. “So, yes, Mr. Foster. One day I stopped looking out, and I looked down. At my feet. My island. I knew if humans were ever to take that first step onto a distant planet—and hope to survive—we must have more data. Data unsoiled by the passage of time or geopolitical influence. Data about ourselves . Can a group of human beings ripped from their homes, their lives, really rebuild civilization on alien land? Or will human nature—as it often does—get in the way?”
“This is starting to feel like a villain monologue,” Dan said. He looked at Mara. “Are we in a villain monologue right now?”
“So you kidnapped people,” Mara said. “Set them loose on the island. Studied them like they weren’t even human.”
“Studied them precisely as humans,” Shae said. He sat back down, rested his cheek in his hand. “My father, for all his faults, finally recognized the value of my research. He funded improvements to the island for my study. The tunnel. Additional hangars, equipment. Other things.”
“Other things?” Mara asked.
“We secured nine wonderful subjects…fascinating subjects. I grew to love each of them. I think they loved me too, in a way.”
“Surely,” Dan said.
“Why take them against their will?” Mara asked. “I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d volunteer a few years of their life for something stupid like this.”
“Yes. But how many would volunteer the remainder of their life?”
That certainly sent a chill through the room.
“I didn’t want those who would volunteer. I wanted a sampling of the everyman—those who would actually be called upon should our species be forced to inhabit another planet.” He twisted in the seat. “Oh, you should have seen what they accomplished. Farms, fisheries, medicine. They developed their own customs, their own traditions. Romances blossomed. They even had holidays! Every nine months or so, when the first of the new coconuts fell from the trees, that was Coconut Day.”
Dan remembered the handmade farming tools that Lenny found in one of the hangars. Were those—
Shae rolled backward across the observatory, seized the remote. The monitors clicked on, but it wasn’t a live feed of the resort anymore. Dan recognized the muted colors and graininess of eighties home videos. Each screen featured a person performing tasks on the island. Chopping wood, gathering berries, fishing, constructing some sort of shelter.
“That is Robert, there, in the top left,” Shae said. “He would sing sometimes when the team was homesick. A baritone. And Mr. Houser, the Black gentleman in the center. Big as a house, that one. Would you believe he was a Somali pirate before we intercepted him?”
“I’d believe just about anything at this point,” Dan said.
“Not one word of English. By the end, he was conversing in full sentences with Jane. There’s our sweet Jane, right of center.” He sighed like a schoolboy whose crush had asked to borrow a pencil. “Truly magnificent. Intelligent, kind, could work a hammer as good as any of the men. And beautiful.”
“She had a husband,” Mara said. “A life. You took that from her.”
“No scientific endeavor has ever been achieved without sacrifice.”
“Can I hold the gun a minute?” Mara asked.
“You know,” Dan said, “we learned about your girl on Netflix. Disappearance Report . People are asking questions about her. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Oh, yes,” Shae said. “I meant to watch it.”
“You didn’t even watch it?”
“I tried. It asked for my Apple ID. I entered my password, but it would not work.”
Dan scratched his cheek. “You shouldn’t need your Apple ID for Netflix. Those are different things.”
“I know. I had to download the app.”
“Did you hit forgot password ?”
“I tried. It said it would send me an email. It did not.”
“That’s impossible. It always sends the email.”
Mara put her hand on Dan’s shoulder and glared.
“I—sorry,” Dan said. “It’s just—he’s an astrophysicist and he can’t work Netflix.”
“What happened to them?” Mara asked.
Shae blinked. “What?”
Mara motioned to the monitors, repeated herself slowly. “What happened to them?”
“Oh.” Shae straightened his coat. “Terrible. Terrible, though informative. A potent strain of flu swept through. Wiped them out. Mr. Houser held out the longest, simply a beast of a man, but alone and hungry, eventually he succumbed too.”
“The flu,” Dan said.
“The fucking flu ,” Mara emphasized.
“The flu can be quite deadly without proper medical care, especially in a malnourished host. Despite several years of island development, our band of survivors was unprepared. One nasty winter, and that was that.” He closed his eyes, cupped his hands in his lap. “Invaluable data.”
Dan wanted to strangle the guy, to pop his little head from his body like a particularly ugly Ken doll. How’d they get the flu ? Why didn’t they treat them? And—
“Winter,” Mara said.
“Yeah,” Dan said.
Mara shuffled through the folder on the desk, found the Polaroid of the cabin in the snow. “Explain this.”
Shae lit up when he saw it, held it at arm’s length. “Oh, now, this was a momentous day. Where did you find this? I have been searching for it.”
“Explain it,” Mara said.
“Why, this is the day we knew the dome worked!”
All sense of feeling left Dan’s extremities. He could barely form his mouth around the words he said next. “The what?” He gripped Mara. “Say—say that again.”
“The snow, Mr. Foster,” Shae said, pointing to the photograph. “That’s how we knew the dome worked.”
The dome? Dome? The word hit Dan’s ear, exploded inside his skull, and sent him and Mara spiraling. No way. No fucking way. A dome ? Like—a dome, dome?
“Would you two like to sit?” Shae asked, standing. “You appear frazzled. I apologize. Had I not mentioned that?”
“A fucking dome,” Dan said breathlessly.
“A dome.” Mara pulled on Dan’s clothing, clung to him like he was the last shred of reality.
Over the…over the island? There was a dome over the island? What kind of cheap-ass…science-fiction…Stephen King Pauly Shore bullshit was this?
“Yes, a dome.” Shae made the shape of it with his hands. “You know, think like a football stadium, but quite a bit larger. We knew if we really wanted to conduct this experiment, we had to stretch the test beyond the Bahamian climate. Beyond Earth’s climate even! So, we built the dome at considerable expense. The gift of a lifetime from my father, truly. Well, besides the island itself. It retracts into the ocean, see. And with it we could control the weather, the temperature, create storms, project sky patterns. It was like—well, it was like—”
“A snow globe,” Dan said. He retrieved the one he’d caught in the dark from atop the filing cabinet.
“Precisely! A snow globe!”
Mara lunged forward, seized Shae by the lapels of his lab coat. “Did the sun explode?”
“My dear, please unhand me—”
She shook him. “Did the sun explode?”
“Mr. Foster, please retrieve your—”
“Answer her,” Dan demanded through gritted teeth.
“Look at me,” Mara said. “Look at me, you fucking psycho. Did. The sun. Explode?”
“Well…” Shae chuckled and patted her shoulder. “Well, no, dear. No. Of course not.”