Now
My throat is sore from talking so much and I feel like death. Next to me, Detective Perez sits in her chair. She’d be a terrible poker player. Her face is one of you have got to be kidding me.
“That’s quite a story,” she says.
“It’s not a story.”
Another child screams down the hall. I’m starting to think of this hospital less as a place of healing and more a hell with four walls.
“Can I have some water, please?”
Detective Perez holds a glass of water with a straw and places it near my lips. She knows the more I move, the more I hurt.
“Thank you,” I say and feed my thirst.
When I finish, she takes the glass and sets it on an end table.
Detective Perez says, “You said you met the guidance counselor near the middle of the island. Can you point out where?” She shows me her phone, a map of the island on its screen. I point at the rendezvous point.
“If that’s the case,” she says with a challenge. “We should find his body there.”
“You will,” I say. “And you’ll see that I’m telling the truth.”
She takes back the phone and then writes a few notes in her yellow legal pad.
“I don’t care if you don’t believe me,” I say. “But Noah and Rachel and Jose and Miss Lauer’s niece and nephew and everyone else, they deserve the truth, and I’m telling it to you as their witness.”
“I was going to say,” Detective Perez says, “that I’ll order an environmental review of the soil and water surrounding the island. And I’d also like to get a blood test from you. If adults really were,” and she pauses, as if the word is foreign to her, “infected and you weren’t, I’d like to know why.”
“Have you heard from my father?”
“Only that he’s still on his way.” She puts her pen down. “So, when you thought there might be a killer on the island, or a serial killer, what you meant to say is that out of a population of 600—most of them adults—is that they were all killers?”
“Eventually,” I say.
“And you kids all acted in self-defense?”
I want to cry. No one believed me on the island until it was too late and no one believes me now. How awful to see the world crumble. When will anyone learn to listen? “You make it sound like we had a choice, Detective. You keep looking at this as if it was a criminal case. It wasn’t.”
She reaches for her phone, about to place a call. “Then what was it?”
“A genocide.”