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done the same thing, except he would have gotten the plan back in the conference room. He said, “Shut up and keep going.”
    They found the first bodies soon after. Three of them, all wearing the protective scrubs, slumped in their chairs around a low table strewn with a frantic storm of printouts and graphs. One had fallen to the floor and lay twisted and tangled, one arm propped against the wall.
    Bob Jr. noticed all three had empty coffee cups nearby and faltered, trying to put the pieces together.
    â€œI told you this was no joke. Keep moving,” Slade said.
    The second airlock was closed, not that it mattered. It hissed open upon command and they stumbled through, feeling the temperature rise at least fifteen or twenty degrees. The greenhouses were close.
    The next body they found, some local wearing the uniform of one of the fieldworkers, was on his stomach in the middle of the corridor. He had a small hole in the back of his head and a gaping, ragged maw where his face used to be. Bob Jr. had to look away. Before today, he’d only seen one dead person in his entire life. That had been when he was twelve, at the open-casket funeral of his church’s former pastor. That man had looked asleep, at peace.
    These people looked interrupted, violated.
    The corridor started up a gentle incline, and Bob Jr. and Slade struggled on, both drenched in sweat. Bob Jr.’s sides hitched and he could feel the morning’s rum threatening to boil back up his throat. Slade’s arm kept slipping, so they switched sides. Slade’s thin fingers were surprisingly strong, and Slade wasn’t shy about using his fingernails to sink his grip into the side of Bob Jr.’s neck.
    Sunlight appeared through the glass doors at the end of the corridor. At first, it was so bright it washed out the artificial lights down there, but as they got closer, it grew dim for some reason, as if heavy storm clouds had covered the sun.
    The panic swelled within Bob Jr., sending bursts of herky-jerky twitches through his muscles, making him lurch along as if he were stepping on exposed electrical currents. Slade’s fingernails left bleeding trails on Bob Jr.’s neck as he struggled to hang on.
    They both heard the distant rattle of automatic gunfire.

    The island burned.
    They had reached the glass doors and saw that the cornfields were on fire. Boiling black smoke filled the sky. Another stitch of gunfire.
    They heard a muffled whump, and a mushroom cloud of fire appeared, roiling above the corn before transforming into a bubbling fountain of smoke. “Fuel truck,” Slade said.
    Bob Jr. craned his head and saw one of the Range Rovers, stalled at an angle across the main road. Smoke seeped from under the hood, the doors hung open, and the bodies of men in bloody gray suits were clustered around it as if a bunch of drunks had all staggered from the vehicle and passed out.
    A man dressed as a lab tech, his blue scrubs startlingly pale against the vivid red and black chaos, moved into sight from behind the SUV. He carried an assault rifle. Another man, a fieldworker, darted at the lab tech with a machete raised over his head.
    The lab tech turned and calmly fired a burst of bullets into the fieldworker’s chest. The fieldworker hadn’t even hit the ground before the lab tech turned back toward the facility’s main entrance, moving with a methodical, unhurried precision. The burning fields threw skittering shadows around him, as if he were illuminated by false gods while a black funeral shroud cloaked the noon sun above.
    Bob Jr. shifted Slade to get a better look. “He . . . he works here. He must. Who the hell is he?”
    Slade panted, struggling for breath. “A mole. Somebody kept here just in case.”
    â€œIn case of what?”
    â€œIn case of something like today.”
    â€œBut you said they would kill everyone on the island.”
    â€œThey will.”
    â€œBut he’s . . .