“I can’t see, Reuben,” he chokes. And then, he begins to scream. “I can’t see! I can’t see who it is, but I know it’s here. It’s telling me things I don’t want to hear. God help me, help me, stop telling me what I can’t see, stop telling me what I can’t—”

Thirteen

Behind You

Gries finally patches a call through to the helicopter rental again, only to be told that the flight had once more been canceled.

“Someone’s sabotaging us,” he says in disgust, as he ends the call. “Someone keeps calling and pretending to be me. It’s useless at this point. There’s a full-fledged storm in the area, and they can’t send help until it passes.”

Hawaiian Shirt looks at him, and then up at the cloudless blue sky, the sun shining down. “Doesn’t look like bad weather to me,” he says.

He says it again later that afternoon, staring out at the sea. The dark clouds that loomed over the horizon earlier are gone, and we have a clear sight from the island’s shore of the mainland some miles away, without even fog to mar the view.

“Maybe it’s just me,” Hawaiian Shirt says, “but there ain’t no fucking storm out there. It’s not only the helicopter rental playing us. Leo’s right. Someone is screwing around with us for fun.”

“No,” Straw Hat says quietly. “We’re getting reports from our team back in Leyte. It’s a full-on downpour there. They’re waiting it out because the streets tend to flood. They’re not lying to us.”

“But we’re not lying, either,” Hawaiian Shirt says desperately, looking at the bright sky and warm sun. “They see rain, but we don’t. What the hell is going on?”

Armani has been sedated; the medics found nothing wrong with his eyes—beyond the fact that he couldn’t see through them—and suggested temporary hysteria, PTSD as a cause.

Hemslock does not sit well with this diagnosis. “Nobody gets PTSD from a damn tree,” he spits out angrily, cleaning his guns again. Their search that day had turned up no signs of his friend, and the frustration is clear on the survivalist’s face. He soon retreats to the mess hall, where he has set up multiple infographics detailing everything known about both the island and the curse. The riddle is scratched out in capital letters on a white board, scribbled notes linking five of the eight prophesied deaths on another.

“Tell me what you think,” he says to me. “Tell me if there’s anything here that I’m missing.”

I scrutinize the boards. The corpse tree takes up much of his theories, along with his belief that the dead body is the ill-fated Cortes. Lindsay Watson’s mugshot stares back at us.

“Third to wear,” Hemslock says. “My gut tells me I’m right. I’m thinking your god’s snagged Karl for the sixth sacrifice. Sixth to lure. Because that’s what he is, eh? He’s bait for the rest of us to enter the Godseye again. But why him? What makes him so special?”