CHAPTER 17 CHAPTER 17JULIA FINDS NOAH SITTING IN one of the rattan chairs, staring out the window, something indescribably sad in his expression, like he’d just received terrible news. But as soon as he hears the creak of the floorboard when she steps into the bedroom, it vanishes, replaced with a smile.
“No offense,” he says, “but you look much, much better.”
The emergency kit is unzipped, laid out on the coffee table in front of him, illuminated by a flashlight standing upright. There’s a small puddle of rainwater from his own clothes pooling near a chair leg; two sets of their muddy boot prints—his and hers—mark the floor. She’s going to be up late tonight, cleaning.
“I feel better with those things off of me. How much time do we have before dinner?”
“No idea. I had a watch, but it mysteriously disappeared. Anything of yours missing?”
“No. I don’t think so.” But now she wishes she’d actually checked her suitcase.
“I could use more light. Can you look in your bottom bureau drawer?”
Oh, right. Isaac had said there would be flashlights, a battery-operated lamp. She goes to the bureau, pulls out the bottom drawer, careful to keep all towels she’s wearing in place. But then, he just saw her in wet, clingy underwear. That proverbial horse has left the barn. She finds some kind of halogen camping lamp, a modern design with a stainless steel base and a plastic globe for a shade. She turns it on. The light warms the entire room.
“When did the electricity go out?” she asks as she brings it back to the coffee table.
“Sometime after lunch. Maybe an hour, maybe more. Your absence was quite the hot topic. And your destination.”
A sideways press for information. She settles into the opposite rattan chair. “There wasn’t much to it. More of a ghost town really. I wasn’t there long. Got lost on the way back.”
He grabs a small brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide, then the tweezers. He pours some of the peroxide over them, letting the excess land on his already sodden shorts.
“Huh. Got lost on a path that hugs the coastline. With a wall between the path and the jungle. You have a terrible sense of direction. Let me see your leg. Actually, put it up on the table.”
She does, and the glass is cold against her calf. For a moment, neither of them speak, the only sound the rain pounding against the bungalow roof. He leans over, peers closely at the spot where she’d pulled the leech off. Picks up the flashlight, focuses its beam there. Pours a trickle of peroxide over it. It bubbles fiercely.
Two seconds later, it stings like hell.
“Ow. Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow.” She sucks air through clenched teeth.
“I know, I’m sorry.” He squints. “Oh, there’s a bit there.” He takes two fingers, gently pinches the flesh around the wound, like he’s extracting a sliver. More blood rushes out.
“How do you know the path hugs the coastline?”
“Because it shows up on the satellite map. That and the wall.”
Words bubble up in her consciousness: wall, mall, hall. It’s an effort not to speak them aloud.
“I thought it was an act, what with your last name,” he continues. “I thought maybe you were research, or development. But you really are just a journalist. Or were a journalist.”
“Am a journalist, thank you.”
You know you’re rhyming words, like Irene.
Don’t think about it.
He takes the tweezers, gently plucks out a bit of . . . something. Then he pours more peroxide over the wound, turning the blood a milky pink.
“So what brought you to your brilliant conclusion that I’m not a researcher?” she asks.
“Your fearlessness leaving the resort. Anyone who understood the danger would never have dared. And not only that, but you went over the wall and deep into the jungle’s interior, which, as far as we know, no one has ever survived. Or if they did, they were never heard of again. Like Irene.”
We. Who’s we?
“But they found Irene.”
“Did they.”
“I went to her grave. I saw the casket.”
He pinches her skin just a little bit harder, to make sure it’s all gone. Obviously she saw a casket, but she has no way of knowing who, or what, they’ll put inside. Which means she’s down half her goal all of a sudden.
Julia crosses her arms over her chest. “Why are you talking to me?”
A shadow flits across his face again. Conflicted.
“No. Really, why are you talking to me?”
He knocks the bit of leech onto the table. Opens an alcohol swab packet. “For one thing, I feel bad, because I honestly thought you were more prepared, and you almost got yourself killed today. What’s going on with your hand?”
She turns it over. The dried blood has washed away, revealed a jagged L shape from where the broken glass cut her.
“Wow,” he says. “Did you manage to not injure any part of your body?”
“Maybe it wasn’t the best time to go exploring. But I’m hoping to get out when the pilot comes to fix the fridge.”
“You and everyone else, except Beth. She was MIA at lunch too, but no one seemed to notice, or care.” He cleans the tweezers with the alcohol swab. “But I think the Reverend may have a class action lawsuit at the end of this. Or so they think. I’ll take care of your hand last. Now, let’s take a look at the big bite on your stomach.”
Julia leans back in her chair, lifts the towel high enough to expose it. Blood on the towel, a lot of it. No washing that out. Fodder for gossip, she’s sure.
“Find anything interesting in your explorations?” he asks.
There’s a pregnant pause. Where would she even begin? With the carnivorous pitcher plants as high as her knees, or the tree embedded with boar’s teeth, or the barefoot girl with pale skin who might be Agnes’s doppelgänger, at least from the way Irene described her. Something she wants to hold close, protect. She doesn’t know what it means, but it’s hers, and hers alone for now. Still, this is where she must decide—alliance, yes or no?
You’re better off not knowing too much, Aunt Liddy had said in answer to any of Julia’s questions about how, or why, or what.
And that, very clearly, is not the case.
“I found Irene’s old camp. What’s left of it. Nothing really interesting there.” She doesn’t mention the small black box in her backpack. “There was a plant with giant leaves. I broke the stalk and this sap oozed out. I almost passed out from the fumes. Then I fell into a puddle . . . or no, not a puddle, more like a pond of mud. Or maybe some kind of quicksand. I was able to grab a tree and pull myself out. Barely.”
A whole world of experience not included in those brief, short sentences.
Chirp, goes the gecko in the bathroom. Chirp, chirp.
Julia casts a glance at the ceiling, just to be sure it isn’t teeming with them.
Noah leans in again, gently touches the area on her belly that’s puffy from the bite. “This one might be infected already. Does it hurt when I touch it?”
“Not really.”
He gently pinches the skin around the wound. She can see it, an opaque bit of jaw—a hard, bloody little lump.
“How’d you find your way back?”
“Aunt Liddy gave me a GPS,” says Julia, omitting that it’s a phone too. “It’s practically out of power though. I don’t know if I could even turn it on again, and without electricity to charge it . . . ow!”
“This might sting a bit more than the last one,” he says. “In fact, let’s not mince words and just be honest. It’s gonna hurt like hell. You’re lucky to be alive. Although I’m starting to think there’s more to it than luck. I’d give anything to see what your antibodies look like right now.”
“What do you mean?”
Noah holds his hand steady, slowly brings the tweezers to the lump. Grips it on either side. Tugs.
“GODDAMN!”
“I know, I know,” he says. The tip of the tweezers slip off. “Shoot. Sorry about that. It’s a bit more . . . embedded. But I don’t want to use too much force; otherwise it might break off, and then it’s just going to get . . . Well, let’s not even go there.”
Julia reaches below her to grip the seat. “All right. It’s going to cost you a can of chili, though.”
“Yeah. The only problem is, there isn’t any chili in those cans.”
He presses one hand on her belly, and this time when he grips the jaw, he pulls back slowly: it starts to come out—it hurts like a sonofabitch—but as it does, there’s a thin strand of something that looks like a fine hair connecting it to Julia’s flesh.
He continues to pull, and the strand just gets longer. Three inches. Six and it’s still not out.
She doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t say anything.
There’s another crack of thunder. An accompanying rumble like the very sky above is about to break into pieces.
She wonders what the strand is, but in an idle way, like the outcome won’t really affect her. It’s her last-resort default defense mode, obliviousness. She closes her eyes.
Once she’d interviewed a soldier with PTSD, three tours in Iraq, who’d been convicted of murdering his family. Sometimes he told investigators he remembered it, and sometimes said he didn’t. When she pressed, he’d finally said that camouflage comes in two forms, one where your enemy tries to hide from view, blend into the background, and the other where your own mind creates the camouflage so you don’t see something you can’t handle. It was the only way he got through his tour. It was the only way he could live with himself after. She feels that she’s missing something right in front of her, something important, but it keeps slipping out of reach, as cagey as the girl in the jungle.
Girl, twirl, whirl.
“Okay, looks like that’s it,” says Noah. “I’m going to pour some peroxide over it, and then we can wrap up with some antibiotic ointment and bandages.”
A forced note of optimism. She opens her eyes, watches as he pours peroxide over the wound on her belly, and the pain is so deep, so intense, she has to physically force herself not to scream. Her hands close on the seat of the chair like a vise.
“Are you okay?” He seems genuinely worried.
No. She’s very much not okay. Okay is the last thing she could possibly be at this moment.
The question of what the hell just happened hangs between them, and Julia gets the feeling that Noah is deeply disturbed, shaken. It’s the time he takes slowly getting another alcohol swab to clean the tweezers again, the time he takes carefully wiping them down, absorbed in some other line of thought altogether, as if the pieces of what he knew, or thought he knew, aren’t adding up anymore. The coiled thread of . . . that thing that was inside her lies on the glass table, inert, looking like it’s just a strand of fine hair.
“I should . . .” says Julia. She stands abruptly, pulling the towel up to cover her stomach. Can’t remember how she was going to finish her sentence, or even why she stood up.
“We should put a bandage on that.”
Lie, fly, cry. “Right. I just need to . . .”
Oh dear God, what the hell was that thing, what the hell is happening to her?
He’s lying to you, says Ethan. He’s pretending to help you, but what do you think he’s been doing all this time, alone in your room? Twiddling his thumbs?
A pure, white-hot rage washes over and through her, and her eyes flit to the armoire. He could have taken anything out of there.
“Julia?” Noah asks cautiously. “You look pale. You should sit down.”
Terminally naive.
Ethan tricked her, and now Noah’s tricked her, she’s sure of it. Pretending to care while an altogether different agenda was at work. Bastard.
“Julia?”
She clutches the towel to her, races for the armoire and yanks out her suitcase, letting it fall to the floor. The same. They’re all the same.
“What are you doing?” asks Noah.
She ignores the sharp, stabbing pain in her stomach, crouches next to the suitcase, flips the latches open with trembling fingers. Opens the top of the case, throws out all of her clothes, tossing them every which way until her fingers find the hidden panel.
“Julia,” says Noah.
She sees him get up out of the corner of her eye, but it doesn’t matter. What an idiot she was. . . .
She clicks the hidden latch, and the fake panel pops open.
“Julia.” Noah crouches beside her.
She frantically digs around in the hidden compartment. Specimen jars, the goddamn specimen jars are there, the white gel, the vial marked PLANT NUTRIENTS, the latex gloves. But the package of pills . . .
Not there.
And the notebook? Did she put it back in the suitcase, or did she leave it out by mistake? She can’t remember. And wait . . . where are the Jack Daniel’s bottles? They’re all gone, every single last one of them.
“Julia, you’re bleeding,” says Noah. He puts a hand on her arm. “We need to get a bandage on that, or—”
She slaps his hand away. “Latex gloves. Where the fuck did you get your latex gloves?” She knows how she sounds—she sounds insane, like a crazy woman, which maybe she is.
“I brought them with me.”
“You just brought latex gloves with you. You just brought latex gloves with you, Noah Cooper, tourist, just like you happened to show up just when I got back, and now you’ve been digging around in my things, taken my things, just like—”
“I haven’t been through your things. Or taken anything. If you really want to know, I brought the gloves with me because I was planning to break into the shed where they stowed our confiscated items to get my things. Then I heard you screaming.”
“So you do have an agenda.”
“I’m not alone in that, am I? And if I took something of yours, where did I put it? Do you want to pat me down, check my pockets? Feel free.”
Words that sound genuine, but are they? Is this just another gambit? Still, he obviously doesn’t have anything in his pockets, and all he has in his left hand is the bandage and ointment . . . but she can’t tell anymore what’s true, or not, what’s real, or not. Her mind feels like a maze that just twists in one direction, then another, and she’s lost all sense of where true north is. She wants to cry, she wants to fall to her knees, but most of all what she wants is to hit him again. Hard.
Where did that come from?
“Here,” says Noah gently, putting up a hand like she’s a spooked horse. “I’ll trade you a truth for a truth, okay? You go first. Ask me a question.”
“What’s in the cans?”
“Fungicide. In an extremely concentrated form. Not great for hands, hence the gloves. Now it’s my turn. Your great-aunt, did she give you any kind of medication?”
It’s the way he’s so nonchalant that she knows it’s important. And there’s no loss telling him the truth, since they’re gone.
“She gave me a package of blue pills. But I didn’t take them today, and now . . . they’re missing.”
“Jesus H. Christ, you didn’t take any today? And you went deep into the jungle, and you, you’re . . . still . . .”
“Still what?”
He gives her a look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. It’s a truth for a truth, Julia, if you’re going to—”
“But I don’t know! Aunt Liddy’s assistant said they were just antibiotics. To ward off possible bacterial infections, like Legionnaires’ disease.”
He gives a dry, bitter laugh. “Legionnaires’ disease. So that’s what they’re calling it now.”
“I take it they’re not antibiotics, then.”
“No, they’re not.” He sighs. “This is going to be more complicated than I thought. Let’s handle the bite on your stomach that’s bleeding. That, at least, we can take care of.”
Gently, like he’s treating a child, he pulls the towel around her waist down just enough to expose the bite, the blood still oozing from the wound. He spreads some of the antibiotic on the bandage. “If it makes you feel any better, I’m out too. Someone made off with my Chiclets, whether because they knew what they were or were just craving some candy, I don’t know. I got in my morning dose, but after lunch, they were gone.”
Clever, smuggling things into the island in plain sight.
“What are they for, Noah?” Although a part of her knows. She knows by the creeping sensation of things subtly altering within her. She knows by the masks that Leanne and the baggage handler wore. The strange compliance of the churchwomen, their bizarre synchronicity. But something won’t allow her to recognize it. She wonders if hearing it out loud will make any difference.
“In layman’s terms, it’s an oral antifungal drug.” He peels the bandage off the wrapper, gently reaches out, presses it against her belly.
“Sorry.” He lets the wrapper for the bandage fall to the floor, unspools some of the white medical tape. Tears off a piece. “Whose turn is it to ask a question?”
“Well, that’s your question, so I’ll go next.”
“Not playing fair,” he says, applying one strip of the tape to the top of her bandage. She notices that his finger is trembling slightly. Trying to be calm, cool, collected, but obviously isn’t.
“Why do we need to be taking an antifungal drug?”
He rips off another strip of tape. “To put it simply . . . well, there’s no way to put it simply, so let’s start with an example. In other tropical regions around the world, Thailand, Brazil, there’s a species of fungus known as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, or ‘zombie fungus,’ which actually hijacks the behavioral systems of carpenter ants. It penetrates the ant’s exoskeleton, and next thing you know, the ant is climbing up the stalk of a plant, latching onto a leaf with a ‘death grip,’ and staying there until it dies and the fungus fruits from its head. A brutish but effective form of reproduction.”
“And you’re saying—”
“Nope, my turn now. How are you communicating with Dr. Greer?”
“I’m not.”
He raises an eyebrow, places the tape on the bottom of the bandage. Rips off another piece.
“The GPS is also a phone,” she says. “But I haven’t called her yet. I’m supposed to. She’s probably pissed as hell at me.”
“So . . . I take it you’re not close,” he says, securing the left side of the bandage. He takes an ironic tone in case she wants to pass it off as a joke, but there’s something else, too, lying underneath.
“I need the money,” she says plainly.
He takes a step back, considering . . . something. Rips off another piece of medical tape. “Ah, well. Don’t we all.”
“You snuck in a question there, don’t think I didn’t notice. So I get two.”
“Are you sure you want two?”
“Yes. And that makes it three. Are you saying that . . . I’m infected with some kind of fungus that will kill me?”
“Yes and no. We’re not sure. But theoretically . . . this fungus isn’t nearly as unsophisticated as Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It takes more of a symbiotic approach. It controls but usually doesn’t destroy the host. And in fact, it passes along some benefits to the host body courtesy of a virus transmitted through its spores that . . . well . . . makes a few alterations in the genome. Triggers the regeneration of sick or dying cells, for example. Which also benefits the fungus, because then its host lasts a long time. But the funny thing is, an infected creature . . . well, they don’t just serve the fungus. They serve other plants on the island. We have intelligence that wild boar have been discovered digging irrigation trenches with their tusks for some areas of the island during bad droughts. Or sitting by trees where the soil lacks nutrients, letting themselves starve to death.”
She’s about to laugh when she realizes he’s dead serious. Then she remembers in the jungle, running across that tree that had teeth and two small tusks embedded in the bark.
Noah carefully places the last piece of tape on the left side of the bandage, presses it firmly. “That should do it,” he says.
“And the tourists, they go back infected?”
“That’s the thing,” he says. “It appears to go into a dormant state off the island. People might experience the health benefit side for a few months, maybe a year. But they don’t display any of the other signs of the infection.”
“You want to kill it. Why?”
“Because we have intelligence that your great-aunt is close to finding a way to sustain it off the island. Has perhaps even modified it. And that would be very, very dangerous.”
“How dangerous?”
“Well, again, this is all theoretical. But the spores put people in a compliant state. To put it mildly.”
“And the pills are . . . an antidote, right?”
“Yes, and your great-aunt has the patent.”
“So how did you get them?”
“We . . . borrowed a supply.”
The break-in. “ ‘Borrowed’ as in ‘stole.’ ”
“The infected respond to volatile organic compounds, telling them what to do. If I got infected, that would have rendered our agenda here pretty useless. We didn’t have much choice.”
Again, this mysterious we. She remembers Aunt Liddy gleefully telling her that the smell of freshly cut grass was actually the way it screamed, the scent of chemicals released in the air. There’s more that he knows, she’s sure, because she’s exceeded her three questions, but he isn’t counting anymore. Because in a way, this is a pitch, an offer on the table, and he’s just feeding her information to get her to buy in.
It’s Aunt Liddy’s greenhouse all over again.
Did I teach you nothing? says Ethan.
She crosses her arms over her chest. “What do you want from me?”
He looks down at his hands, plays with the edge of the medical tape as if to give them something to do. “We think there’s a flower, rumored to smell like a rotting corpse. If we understood what its role is, maybe the fungus wouldn’t be such a threat. And if I can’t neutralize the threat . . . well, the team will move on to plan B if I can’t confirm that I’ve neutralized it. That’s gonna happen soon.”
For a moment, he doesn’t speak, and she doesn’t press. An internal struggle, like the real Noah wants to break through, but isn’t sure he can.
Finally he looks up. Meets her eyes. “I honestly just wanted to help people. I thought if I was able to neutralize it here, extract a sample to continue research into its healing properties . . . I mean, people who have come to Kapu have been cured of cancer. Cancer, you understand? All the worst kinds, too. And Parkinson’s. Muscular dystrophy. ALS, which took my brother. And yes, even leprosy.”
This too could easily be a lie, but it feels like the truth, or something close to it. “What’s plan B, Noah?”
A shadow flickers across his face.
Chirp, goes the gecko. Chirp, chirp.
Finally he says, “The entire island gets nuked. Yes, that kind of ‘nuked.’ Us along with it.”
Suddenly, there’s the mournful, lonely sound of a conch shell being blown from somewhere off in the distance.