All of that, and for what?
“The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
This can’t be how it ends. All this blood. All those lives…
“Gaby!” someone shouted in her ear. Danny. “Get your ass moving!”
How did he know she wasn’t already moving?
Because he was Danny, and he knew her. Just like Will knew her. They had trained her themselves on this very island, where she had dreamt about coming back to night after night. Only to have it end now…like this?
“Gaby!” Danny again. “Move your ass! That’s an order! Vamos!”
How the hell did he know she wasn’t already moving?
She pushed up from the slightly damp ground and onto her feet, then spun around and began running through the woods. She was glad to go, happy to be leaving the beach behind. If not figuratively, at least literally. She was going to have nightmares about tonight for years to come, she knew that much, and the less she could remember the images — the blood, the dead…but especially the dead — the better.
She tried to do that now — push the sight of those men falling as she shot them — as Danny and Keo shot them — out of her mind. But they were still too fresh and the best she could do was tell herself it was either her or them, because they hadn’t come here to talk. They had come here armed and ready to kill.
The wind against her face, the branches slapping her legs and arms, brought her back to the present. Back to the here and now. And right now, they were evacuating the island—
Wait, how was she moving so fast? Oh, right; because she wasn’t as weighed down by ammo as she was when the night started, because she had used up all her spare magazines. The one in the M4 at the moment was only half full, and once she used it up she would be down to just the Glock in her hip holster. At least she had two spare magazines for that.
The bodies on the beach. I did that. I killed those men.
God help me, I killed those men.
For a second or two, she entertained the idea of stopping and turning around and running back to the beach and collecting spare magazines from those very same men who she couldn’t stop thinking about.
Did they want to come here? Were they forced? Did they have friends or family waiting for them back in the towns? She remembered the woman with the boy in L15 and the countless other people walking along the sidewalks. Couples. Families. Was there a husband among the dead on the beach right now? Maybe she had killed him. Or maybe it was the man next to him—
Stop it. They’re gone. You did what you had to do.
Focus!
The clicking in her right ear helped her to concentrate on the moment, on the branches still slapping against her arms and legs, and the chill that pervaded the island and soaked her to the very bones despite her clothing.
“Lara,” a voice said.
“Keo!” Lara shouted back. “Where are you?”
“Southwest corner, just beyond the power station.”
“What do you see?”
“More assaulters. They’re coming through the shack next to the power station and heading right at you.”
“How many?”
“Too many. But if we coordinate a defense—”
“No,” Lara said, cutting him off. “It’s not the humans we have to worry about. Without the shack, there’s nothing to hold them back. Do you understand? Get to your exit point. We’re getting off the island!”
“Roger that,” Keo said, and the radio went quiet again.
Gaby burst out of the woods a moment later and into the almost pitch-black state of the hotel grounds. Even the Tower in the distance was barely visible, a hulking and darkened spire sticking out of the cliff, the familiar floodlights that usually adorned its exterior missing. Not gone, just turned off like the rest of the island, along with the LED lamps that had been inside the third floor a few hours ago.
For the first time in a long time, Gaby felt alone. The others were gone, moving toward their exit points. Soon, they’d all be converging on the Trident, anchored somewhere on the other side of the island. Lara’s Plan D, just in case everything went to hell.
I guess this means everything’s gone to hell.
She jogged across the tall grass, trying to get her bearings as she went. She had exited the woods at a random point and was much further away from the hotel than she had expected. She could see its squat one-story shape in the distance, the walls visible against the deep black of a lightless world. She was so used to seeing the grounds around the hotel lit up by bright LEDs that not having those markers now was startling.
She turned away from the hotel and ran in the direction of the Tower, where her designated exit point was. Even without lights, it was hard to miss, its structure looming against the moonlit sky. Carly or Benny would have already put the escape ladder in place over the cliff and climbed down, where two cheap aluminum boats, each with a pair of paddles inside, awaited them among the rocks. If both of them had left at the same time (which made sense), they would have left one boat down there for her. Or, at least, she hoped.
She was halfway to the Tower when the pop-pop-pop of assault rifles made her slide to a stop in the tall grass. The shooting was coming from her left, where the hotel was. The vicious back-and-forth paralyzed her, and Gaby didn’t know whether to keep running to her exit point or turn toward the hotel.
“The island is lost! I repeat! The island is lost! We’re evacuating Song Island!”
Orders were orders, but the sound of gunfire seized her and refused to let go. Maybe it was the ferocious nature of it, or its proximity — so close, and yet so far away. Who was shooting? Lara and Danny and how many assaulters? It was definitely concentrated inside the hotel, she was sure of it. There was a hollow almost echo-y quality to the gunshots, hints that they were coming from enclosed spaces.
“We’re pinned!” someone screamed in her right ear. Lara. She was shouting to be heard over the continuous roar of rifles firing at close proximity. “Blaine, take off now!”
“What?” Blaine shouted back through the radio. “We’re not leaving without you! Get over here!”
“We’re not going to make it!”
“Then we’ll come back to you!”
“Don’t be stupid!”
“Lara!”
“That’s an order, Blaine! Move your ass now or I’m sending Danny over there to kick it!”
“Yeah, what she said!” Danny chimed in.
“Danny!” Carly. “What are you doing? Get over here, you dumbass!”
“Get going!” Danny shouted back. “We’ll catch up! I promise, babe!”
“You goddamn better!”
“Scout’s honor!”
“You were never in the scouts—” Carly started to say, when a loud explosion drowned out the voices all trying to speak at the same time.
The blast had come from the hotel, almost a football field away from her, but it sounded much closer. Thick plumes of smoke were drifting into the air, looking almost poetic against the black canvas of night. But she knew there was nothing lyrical about it, especially when the gunfire temporarily halted in the aftermath.
Gaby was running full-speed toward the hotel before she even realized she had made the decision. About ten seconds into her run, the shooting started up again, the back-and-forth still as frenzied as they had been before the explosion. As horrific as it was to think so, the fact that two sides were exchanging gunfire was a good sign that either Lara or Danny (or both) were still alive.