She picked her way along this untended portion of beach back toward the marina, watching her feet so she didn’t trip on any of the junk embedded in the sand. She came to another chain-link fence, this one running down into the water, but luckily found a gate unlatched and didn’t have to climb again. Then she was in front of a battered gray warehouse. She’d seen it at an angle from Pete’s car and knew that it extended like a long arm to brace one side of the marina.
And now the swell of voices reached her over the wind. She had to slosh down into the mud to get around the old warehouse, and every time she stepped, a few inches of filthy water swirled up around her shoes. On the far side of the warehouse was the parking lot the police had blocked off, and the crowd had assembled there, some people carrying signs and chanting in unison, some camped out on the asphalt with picnic blankets and binoculars, like they were at a summer concert. A few kids Gemma’s age or slightly older were grouped along the edge of a neighboring roof, legs dangling like icicles from the eaves, watching the action. Gemma counted fifty people and at least a dozen cops. What was going on at Haven that it would be so worth protecting? Or destroying?
She slipped unnoticed into the crowd.
She passed a man wearing a plastic Viking helmet that had been outfitted with different antennae and metal coils. He kept pacing in circles, gesturing to an invisible audience and muttering, and when he caught Gemma looking, he whirled on her and continued his monologue even more loudly “—and why we couldn’t drink any of the water when we were stationed in Nasiriyah, fear of poison, of course some must have gone in the food supply and that’s why the doctor says holes in my brain—”
She turned quickly away. Several people wore gas masks that made them look like the bad guys in a horror film, or like enormous insects, which made it even weirder that they were standing around in jeans and beat-up Top-Siders, gazing out over the water. The protesters, she saw, were calling for Haven’s shuttering. Our Land, Our Health, Our Right, read one sign, and another said, Keep Your Chemicals Out of My Backyard. But among them were signs with other, stranger messages: signs that referenced Roswell and Big Brother and zombies, and several posters screaming about the dangers of hell. One girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve was holding a colorful handmade sign with bubbly letters: And Cast Ye the Unprofitable Servant into Outer Darkness.
Gemma picked out a sunburned middle-aged couple who looked normal enough and fought her way over to them. The man wore leather sandals and a baseball hat with the logo of a hunting lodge on it. The woman was wearing a fanny pack. Both of them were staring out toward the billowing clouds of smoke in the distance, which made it look as if a volcano had erupted mid-ocean.
“What’s going on?” Gemma asked them. It was funny how disasters made friends of everyone. “Is anyone saying how the fire started?”
The man shook his head. “Nothing official. Heard maybe a gas line blew up. Of course the island’s loaded with chemicals, would have caught fast—”
His wife snorted. “It was no gas line,” she said. “We’ve talked to a dozen locals say they heard at least two explosions, one right after another.”
“Explosions,” Gemma repeated, shifting the backpack strap on her shoulder. Sweat had gathered under the collar of her shirt. “Like a bomb or something?”
The woman gave Gemma a pitying look. “You’re not from around here, are you? People have been calling for the institute or whatever it is to be shut down for years now. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone decided to take a shortcut. Of course the rumors . . .” She spread her hands.
“What kind of rumors?” Gemma pressed, although she remembered from the Haven Files a long list of all the different things supposedly manufactured at Haven—everything from incredibly contagious diseases to human organs.
“Some people think they got aliens out there on that island,” the husband said. Now Gemma understood the reference to Roswell, where an alien spaceship had supposedly crashed and then been concealed by the military. “Well, I tell you, we come up every year from Orlando to do a little paddling and bird-watching in the reserve. Great birds up here—white ibis, knots, and dowitchers on the old oyster bars. You interested in birds?” Gemma arranged her face into what she hoped was a polite expression and nodded. He harrumphed as if he didn’t believe it and went on, “I’ve got a pair of binoculars can spot a pine grosbeak at a distance of eight hundred yards, and I’ve done a little sighting of the island and never seen any glowing green men.” He kept his eyes on the fire in the distance. “But I’ll tell you they have guards in mounted towers, barbed-wire fences sixteen feet high. They’ll shoot you if you get too close and won’t blink about it. They say they’re doing medical research out there, stuff for our boys overseas, but I don’t buy it. They’re hiding something, that’s for sure.”
Another chopper went by overhead, and Gem felt the staccato of its giant rotor all the way in her chest. It seemed obvious that no one knew what was happening or had happened out in Haven, but still she fought through the crowd, searching for an official, for someone in charge. Forcing her way through the knot of protesters, she saw a policeman arguing with a dark-haired boy with the kind of symmetrical good looks that Gemma associated with movies about superheroes. The cop was holding a professional-looking camera and appeared to be deleting pictures.
“. . . no right to confiscate it,” the boy was saying, as Gemma approached. “That’s private property.”