“GUYS!” I whisper breathlessly, my alarm catching in my dry throat as I hurtle out of Bill’s domicile and back into the patchwork shadows of the bunker hallway. I don’t stop running until I collide with Marcos just as he’s prying open Darcy’s cage. My fractured spearhead cracks as, once again, this useless stick has gotten itself caught between iron bars. I snap off the ruler-length shard and chuck it angrily to the floor, spitting, “Goddamn thing!”

“What’s wrong?” Marcos asks.

“Did you find something?” Darcy asks, piling on. Both of them fall into a grave silence as they recognize the inhuman fear eating my brain alive.

“It’s Bill,” I gasp. “Bill is Ricky’s father. I found a picture of them—”

“But Ricky is dead,” Marcos protests, the gears in his head clicking rapidly. “Bill said his family was coming tonight.”

“I…I forgot about that. I don’t know. Whoever’s coming, it isn’t Ricky. There’s a family photo of them in that room!”

“You didn’t see any tapes?” Darcy asks, snatching my wrist. “What about that letter Bill got, saying his family’s coming? Is it in there?”

“Nothing. Just the picture. Guys…he didn’t know what Google was.” Both thrown for a loop, Marcos and Darcy scrunch their brows. “I told Bill I would Google something when I got home, and he literally didn’t know what I was talking about, like he’d never heard of it.”

“Like he’s been on an island for twenty years,” Darcy says. Her shoulders deflate as the same nightmarish understanding envelopes her. Marcos’s finger-snapping fills the bunker.

“He’s not like the other staff. He sleeps in this shithole, not the cabin. He never leaves the island, not even for supply runs. I think he did something terrible…”

“Go,” Marcos says. “As fast as we can.”

Duty has replaced the timid boy in Marcos with the grown man who comforted me in the cave. Marcos’s bearish grip seizes my arm just under the pit and launches me headfirst down the galley of prison cells. Clutching spears, the three of us race back the way we came, rounding the corner where Briggs remains locked in his own private purgatory. At first, I lead the pack, but Darcy pulls ahead, deftly weaving between the stacked crates. Marcos leaps over boxes as easily as a jaguar clearing a track hurdle.

Our steel-doored exit waits only another few seconds ahead…

A floodlight batters through the dark with an icy, accusatory beam—like a SWAT team halting our path. Darcy and Marcos throw their hands across their eyes. “I’m not armed,” the Reverend says from the darkness behind the light. “I ordered my staff to stand down. I didn’t want any of you to get scared and get yourselves lost in the jungle. No one’s going to hurt you, so don’t do anything stupid with those spears.”