The Hunted (3 page)

“I'm not asking for no welcoming party,” Marcus said, “but damn.” He waved the kids off and sat back down.

Shy saw that they were sitting on a long patch of sandy cement, like a wide sidewalk or a basketball court. A fallen stretch of chain-link fence was visible in the tide to the right of them. Beyond the fence sat a wrecked Honda Civic, water rushing in and out of the busted windshield. Behind them, all the seller stalls were scorched and a bunch of chained-up food carts were tipped on their sides and already showing rust. The only thing Shy halfway recognized was the blackened remains of Muscle Beach to their left, where he'd once stopped with his old man to watch a group of 'roid heads tossing around free weights.

He turned to Carmen. “So how we supposed to get down to San Diego from here?”

She shrugged. “There's gotta be buses still running. Or trains.”

Marcus frowned. “You're kidding, right?”

“What?” Carmen said. “There could be limited service or whatever. Like, just on freeways.”

“Look at this place,” Marcus told her. “Ain't limited
nothin'.
”

Were
there still buses? Shy wondered. What about food stores and hospitals and gas stations? And then another question occurred to him: was Addie out here somewhere?

She'd left the island on that helicopter with her dad, but where had they gone? And what would he do or say if their paths crossed again?

Shoeshine lifted their last jug of water out of the duffel. He uncapped it and held it out to Carmen. When she was done drinking, she passed the jug to Shy, who took a few desperate gulps of his own. He could feel the cool liquid settling in his stomach as he moved the jug along to Marcus.

Once they'd killed the water, Shoeshine capped the empty jug and looked around. “I plan to track down a few supplies tonight and get my bearings,” he said. “First thing in the morning I'll start east.”

“How?” Marcus said.

The man unlocked his journal with the key around his neck, flipped through several pages and used his teeth to uncap his pen. “Trust I'll find a way,” he said.

Shy watched Shoeshine start writing.

Their monthlong journey in the sailboat had been filled with a whole lot of nothing. The sun rose and fell. The ocean whispered. Their tattered boat crept through the water, leaving a subtle wake that Shy would stare at for hours. They took turns fishing and steering and manning the sail. They spoke in quiet voices, and often didn't speak at all. But there was one topic they kept coming back to: what would they do if they actually made it back to California?

Shoeshine wanted to get the syringes into the hands of scientists as soon as possible. According to the report they'd heard, groups of them had gathered somewhere in Arizona to try and create a vaccine they had no idea already existed. Shy understood how important it was that the duffel get to
Arizona—hundreds
of thousands of lives were on the line—but he wanted to see about his family first. In case they needed him. It was the same for Carmen and Marcus.

After some back-and-forth, Shoeshine settled it by agreeing to take the duffel to Arizona himself. “No one said we had to stay together forever,” he'd told them, looking directly at Shy.

When Shoeshine was done writing, he slipped his journal back into the duffel and zipped up. “Not much daylight left,” he said, climbing to his feet.

“Maybe we should go with him,” Carmen said to Shy and Marcus. “Just for the night.”

“We need supplies, too,” Shy said, struggling to stand. He didn't understand how he could feel more seasick on land than he'd ever felt on water.

“We can split up in the morning,” Marcus added.

This was what they were all saying, but Shy knew the truth: they wanted to stay with Shoeshine as long as possible. He was the only reason they were still alive.

The farther they moved into town, the more devastation Shy saw. He studied the battered fish restaurant they passed on a street named Windward Avenue. The roof was caved in, and all that was left of the windows were long, blackened shards. The place next to it was burned beyond recognition. The poles holding up street signs were all tilted at odd angles, and many were spray-painted fluorescent green. Everything smelled of burned plastic and charcoal and brine. A small battered boat was on its side in the middle of the street.

Shy studied the fluorescent-green street signs, wondering who was going to fix all this. And how. What if they had to level the entire city and start from scratch?

He tried to imagine his own neighborhood back home, then thought better of it and focused on his surroundings.

They were halfway through the first cross street, Pacific Avenue, when Shy spotted the kids on bicycles riding back into view. Only this time they were followed by a handful of adults. Some on bikes. Others on foot.

Shy stopped in his tracks when he noticed something else.

Two of the men were carrying rifles.

The group spread out around Shy and his crew, forming a crude semicircle of masked faces. All of them had shaved heads or wore hats, and they were too far away for Shy to make out the look in their eyes, especially in the fading daylight.

One of the men with a rifle lowered his medical mask slightly and called out: “Turn around slowly and head back where you started.” This man was naturally bald, it looked like. And thin. His voice raspy.

Shy looked to Shoeshine, but he was already turning around and walking the other way.

Carmen and Marcus were as wide-eyed as Shy.

“Go on now,” the bald man said, motioning them forward with his rifle. “Walk.”

Before Shy even understood what was happening, the four of them were retracing their footsteps, past the battered fish restaurant and all the other damaged buildings. He kept his eyes partially on the asphalt in front of him, stepping around sharp objects with his bare feet and trying to think. Who were these people? And why did they have rifles?

As soon as they were back on the sand-covered boardwalk, the bald man called for them to stop.

Marcus nudged Shy as the four of them turned around. “Shit, I woulda lost it if they tried to get me back on that boat.”

“Still might,” Shy said, watching two of the masked men pointing out toward the sea.

The bald man spoke again: “Who are you? And where'd you come from?”

A guy dressed in overalls and a straw hat lowered his mask, too. “Everyone knows you're supposed to stay put,” he said. “You're lucky it was us who caught you and not the Suzuki Gang.”

“Our cruise ship wrecked,” Carmen blurted out. “We're the only ones who made it back.”

The men looked at each other, their masks making it impossible to read their reactions. One of the kids on bikes was staring directly at Shy. He wore a filthy-looking gray sweatshirt. Hood up. Baggy jeans tucked into combat boots. He held a large white jug by its handle.

Shy was first to look away.

“What's happening here?” Marcus asked. “Is everyone really dying from that disease?”

The leader ignored Marcus and pointed out toward the water instead. “Who owns that boat?”

“
We
do,” Shy said. “We got it off an island way out there.”

“What island?” someone asked. “Catalina?”

“Jones Island,” Shy corrected him.

Another man lowered his mask and said to the leader: “It doesn't add up, Drew. They just told us they were on a cruise.”

“They look sick,” one of the kids said. “They probably got kicked out of somewhere else before it spread.”

“Make 'em go back where they came from,” another kid said.

“No, we gotta shoot 'em,” the first kid said.

Shy stared at the pack of kids in shock.

A guy in a Dodgers cap cocked his rifle suddenly and raised it.

“Yo, man!” Marcus called out, shielding his face with his hand. “Slow down! Damn!”

Shy cowered along with Carmen and Marcus, spooked, but Shoeshine just stood there, unfazed.

The guy in overalls dropped his bike, walked over to the man in the Dodgers cap and lowered the barrel of the rifle. “That's not who you are, Tom.”

“They can't even answer a simple question!” the man shouted.

“Who cares what they say,” someone else blurted out. “Leave the gun alone, Mason. You know what we have to do.”

Shy's heart pounded. These people were actually arguing about whether or not to
shoot
them.

The guy named Mason made sure the barrel stayed aimed at the ground. “Explain how you got here,” he said. “We don't allow outsiders to wander into our zone.”

“What ‘zone'?” Carmen said. “We don't even know what that means.”

“We claimed this entire stretch of beach weeks ago.”

“It's marked on all the signposts,” someone else said. “There's no way you could've missed it.”

Shy remembered the fluorescent-green spray paint he'd seen on many of the street signs. Had the entire state been marked off into zones? Had his neighborhood in Otay Mesa?

Carmen was first to step up again. She told the masked group how the four of them had been working on a luxury cruise ship bound for Hawaii. How the earthquakes had created a massive tsunami that wrecked their ship. How they had to bail into a dark, stormy ocean on lifeboats and life rafts with no sense of where they were or what they were supposed to do.

Shy listened to Carmen rattle off details about finding the half-flooded island, climbing the stone steps up to the hotel where they found food and water and shelter, where they survived for days.

“Less than a hundred of us made it there alive.” Carmen was talking so fast she had to pause to catch her breath. “Us four…All we wanted to do was see about our families. So we fixed up that broken sailboat out there.”

“And now here you are,” the leader said, glancing at the men beside him. He didn't seem impressed.

“We just wanna go home,” Carmen said.

“Home,” someone scoffed. “Good one.”

Shy was glad Carmen had left out the rest. If she'd told the men about the pharmaceutical company, LasoTech, razing the entire island to cover up its connection to the disease, it would only have led to more questions. And those questions might've led to the syringes stashed in Shoeshine's duffel bag.

The guy in the Dodgers cap turned his gun on Carmen. “I don't believe you,” he said. “I think you came here from Santa Barbara. We've all heard about their recent outbreak.”

Shy instinctively stepped in front of Carmen. “Everything she said is the truth.” He turned to the leader. “Come on, man. We were just struggling out there for thirty-six straight days. With barely anything to eat or drink. And now you wanna point a gun at us?”

“It's
you
who are pointing the gun at
us
!” the leader shouted at Shy. “Don't you get that? If one person brings the disease into our zone, we all die.”

“We don't care about your stupid zone,” Carmen said. “We just wanna go find our families.”

“You'll leave the sailboat with us,” the leader announced.

“Take it,” Shy told him. “We never wanna see that piece of shit again.”

Shoeshine stepped forward. “We'll need something in return.”

The guy in the Dodgers cap grinned as he turned to the rest of his group “The old man speaks.”

“In exchange for the boat you can have your lives,” the leader said. “How's that for a fair trade?”

Shy heard the kids behind the man snicker through their masks. The guy in the Dodgers cap pointed at the duffel hanging off Shoeshine's shoulder. “Why don't you tell us what's in the bag.”

Shy froze.

The syringes. The letter that documented how LasoTech had created Romero Disease. Their only item of actual proof.

“Water and a few shirts,” Shoeshine answered. “Some paper to write on.”

“Let's see,” the man said.

Shoeshine didn't move.

“Go on, unzip it.”

Shy's eyes grew wide as Shoeshine unzipped the duffel and held it open. Even though these guys would have no idea what the syringes were for, or how important the letter was, they'd demand them, too. Shy was sure of it. And what would Shoeshine do
then
? Explain everything?

The man with the Dodgers cap slid his mask back over his face and set down his bike. He took the white jug from the kid holding it and started toward Shoeshine. “Toss it on the ground, old man.”

Shoeshine set the duffel down, and the man motioned him away.

Shy watched nervously as the man began sifting through the bag's contents with the tip of his rifle. He nudged a couple of shirts out of the bag and doused them with liquid from the white jug, which smelled like bleach. He did the same to the empty water container. And the compass. He even poured bleach on the beat-up leather cover of Shoeshine's journal.

He was trying to disinfect everything, Shy realized.

The man reached down to flip open the journal's damp cover, but stopped when he saw it was locked. He folded over the top of the cover and kneeled down to read the few lines that were visible.

Shy still had no idea what Shoeshine wrote in his book. Nobody did. Marcus had asked on the sailboat once, but Shoeshine only gave a cryptic answer. “It's a study of human beings,” he'd said without looking up. “A way of recording our path in the new world.”

The man tossed down the journal and kicked the bag open wider. Holding it open with the butt of his rifle, he doused the whole thing with bleach. “Any more bags we should know about?” he asked.

“Just the one,” Shoeshine said.

Shy didn't understand why the man hadn't pulled out the syringes or the letter. How could he have missed them?

The man turned to Marcus next. “What about the radio?”

“Doesn't work,” Marcus told him, flipping on the power button and pulling up the antenna to prove it. The radio didn't make a sound.

“Empty your pockets,” the man demanded.

Before Marcus could reach for his pockets, though, the leader said: “That's enough, Tom. We've got the boat. Now let's get them out of here.”

The two men stared at each other.

“We can't just let them go,” someone else said. “What if they come back?”

“They won't come back,” the man named Mason said.

“We should shoot them right now!” someone shouted. “We have that right!”

The leader yanked his mask down and faced his group. “Listen to yourselves!” he barked. “I refuse to sit here and watch us turn into the Suzuki Gang!”

Shy breathed a sigh of relief as the man in the Dodgers cap finally lowered his rifle and started back toward his bike, shaking his head in disgust.

“Gregory. Chris.” The leader pointed at two of the kids. “Go disinfect the boat. Now!” When the kids dropped their bikes and took off toward the water with the bottle of bleach, the leader turned back to Shy and his crew. “You will never set foot in our zone again,” he said. “Understand me? Next time the consequences will be much greater.”

Shy nodded with the others.

“Mason,” the leader called out to the guy in overalls. “Follow them. Make sure they leave our zone completely and understand the borders.” He turned to the man in the Dodgers cap. “Tom, give Mason your rifle.”

Tom pulled down his mask, revealing a look of disgust. “Are you shittin' me, Drew?”

“Now!” the leader demanded.

The man spit to the side of his bike before tossing the rifle to Mason.

Shy watched them all secure their medical masks over their faces again, readying themselves to leave.

Mason kept his distance from Shy and his crew, saying: “Head straight down the street in front of you. Go on.”

As Shy started toward the road, he glanced over his shoulder at the rifle in Mason's left hand, then at Mason's expressionless eyes. What if “follow them” was code for something far worse?