Enter Belinda’s world …

Excerpt from The Lifeboat.

A pebble beach, early December. Blood oozes into the snow, turns the frothing surf a vomit-colored pink. A salty wind whips off the water, slashing at Mike Jardin’s face. He falls to he knees.

In the surf, the wind snaps at the angry sail of a small, beached catamaran. Four duffel bags are scattered around it. The bodies of a man and a woman lie before him. A third person — another woman — is crawling toward the dirt road. She won’t make it, he thinks.

The sun droops low in the sky, the day slipping behind the veil of evening. The smell of the seaweed mixes with the stench of blood as it spreads along the rocks, swirling away from the bodies as the waves caress them, drawing out death, spreading it into the great, white ocean.

So much blood. Always surprising how much there is, Mike thinks. It’s on his hands. So sticky. How did it get on his hands? Breathe.

The odor of gutted bass, roasting on an open fire, mixes with the metallic stench of human death. His dinner, a hundred yards away, is burning.

He looks up. Some distance away, at the far tip of where the long sandbar stabs the ocean, a silent white lighthouse reprimands him. He has done something terrible. He knows this much.

The lighthouse is an old friend. A long time ago he and Nathalie broke in for secret rendezvous. From the lantern room they could see all the way to the the supplicants’ encampment at the wildlife refuge on the mainland.

He sits back on the rocks. Pain in his backside. He must have slumped down. Next to him, his shotgun and the man’s pistol. He is not in denial. He knows what happened: he just shot three people. But the fact seems distant.

He tells himself over and over again that he didn’t have a choice. It was his responsibility — his job. The Professor and Josephine had put their faith in him. Protecting the island from outside infection was the whole reason he had been recruited — the only reason he earned a place that so many others had been denied.

The crawling woman stops. Quiet descends on the beach like a weary sigh. Mike holds his knees to his chest, rocks and sways like a wobbling top. A voice in the back of his head tells him to get it together.

The catamaran took him by surprise. It swept in swiftly with the current, bouncing over the waves toward a point along the outer bank, sliding up onto the beach only a hundred yards away from where he cooked his dinner.

By the time he saw it, a man and two women were shouting frantically at each other as they tried to pull it ashore. The man was young and dark haired, with a military build. The women were middle aged. The blonde dressed functionally, in a thick army peacoat and heavy knee boots. The other woman was out of place — even from that distance, Mike could see her shivering and stumbling over the pebbles in her shearling boots and suede, flower-print coat.

They weren’t supposed to be here. Grenisey Island was a designated virus-free zone. No one had gotten a permit to even visit in a long time. The Coast Guard was supposed to keep refugees away — the Lifeboat had an agreement with Food and Security to keep the island isolated — but no one had seen the Coast Guard in months. According to Josephine, a wealthy landowner was going to take over security, but Fuchs and Professor Connelly were still working out the details. In the meantime, the Lifeboaters and the town did what they could to protect themselves.

Mike shared the patrol duties with a couple of townies. They didn’t trust each other, but they had the same agenda: keep the Sickness out.

The man and women on the catamaran must have come from the encampment of people across the water — “supplicants”, was what Danika called them — who waited hungrily for a chance to join the Lifeboat that would never come. Maybe they had simply gotten desperate enough to try to cut the line, hoping that once they arrived no one would be willing to kick them off.

Get out there and keep an eye on the water, Josephine said. Make sure no one comes ashore.

Professor Connelly and Josephine had given Mike one job — trusted him to do one thing — and he had blown it.

What do I do if I see someone?

Call us.

He had fumbled with his phone, but reception on the sandbar was spotty on the best of days.

What if I can’t get through?

No one had answered that question. Instead they had given him a gun — an assault rifle at first, and then a shotgun when the rifle made the townies nervous. Can’t afford to make the townies nervous.

He started down the beach toward the people, shogun pointing to the sky.

They waved, smiling.

Professor Connelly and Josephine had been very clear. People who weren’t cleared were contamination. Their motives didn’t matter. If someone from outside managed to get ashore without going through verified quarantine, Food and Security would consider the whole island infected. Everything they were working toward would be destroyed.

“Back off!” He fired a warning shot into the air. A gut-shaking boom roared over the beach. That should have done it; they should have turned back. He saw fear in their eyes now, but instead of running, they moved to either side of him, as if warily surrounding a rabid animal.

The man shouted, “Just relax. All you have to do is look away for a minute. Walk down the beach. Then it won’t be your fault, right? We just want to have a better life. We know you understand.”

We just want a better life. The Supplicants all said that, didn’t they? But they weren’t stupid. As Danika had often pointed out, the Supplicants had to know that Grenisey Island had its own carrying capacity, that the Lifeboat would sink if it tried to take in everyone. They’re not trying to come here to live, Danika would say, but to die.

“You can’t come here,” Mike shouted.

“It’s okay.” The blonde one said. “We’re not sick.”

“Didn’t you see the warnings?” He pointed to a handprinted, wooden sign on the beach reading TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT.

The man now circled to Mike’s left side. Mike saw movement from the corner of his eye — a hand raised. He pivoted, the shotgun still at his shoulder. The man took aim with a handgun, but Mike fired first. The kick took him by surprise. He fired high — shot tore into the man’s face, spinning him to the ground. Mike turned toward the women then. The blonde had pulled her own gun now. Mike pumped and fired without hesitation. The woman’s chest burst open.

The other woman — the one in the impractical shearling boots — tried to speak, her mouth moving but with no words coming out. Was she was panicking and unable to talk, or had the ringing of the shotgun cut off his ability to understand her?

She moved forward, a desperate, pleading look on her face. He imagined the Sickness emanating from her body, an oozing, invisible miasma wafting from her haunted eyes and flared nostrils. He pumped the gun and then realized it was empty — he had left the rest of his ammunition in his bag by the fire. The woman paused.

Mike ran toward the dead man. The woman sprinted toward the road. By the time Mike pried the semi-automatic from the man’s hand, the woman was halfway to the road. He shouted one more time and then fired. He missed the first four shots. The fifth dropped her to the earth like a rag doll.

Mike catches movement out of the corer of his eye. He stands up. The circuits in his brain have disconnected; he isn’t sure what he’s seeing.

He looks up at the catamaran, which has turned and is drifting away, pulled into the water by the current. The rear door of the cabin opens, and a shivering figure emerges and tumbles off the boat into the surf. A young woman.

“Please,” she says hoarsely. “Don’t hurt me.”

She moves toward him, a questioning look on her face. She isn’t wearing a mask.

He looks down at his sticky hands again. Stop, he thinks, but can’t get the words out. A voice in his head shouts at him again, warning him of infection, but he doesn’t pick up the gun.

“What’s happening?” he asks.

She pauses, her gaze moving from body to body. Her expression is numb and inscrutable. “They’re dead?”

“You aren’t supposed to come here,” he says.

“Are you going to kill me?”

The empty shotgun lies next to him on the beach, smeared with blood. He isn’t sure what happened to the pistol. “You aren’t supposed to be here,” he says again.

“They brought me. We were going to sneak me in.” Her hand flies to her mouth, as if she has finally understood the scene before her. She closes her eyes. “Are you one of his people?”

“Whose people?”

She doesn’t answer this, but instead turns numbly toward the water.

“I’ve killed these people,” he mumbles.

She nods. Now there are tears running down her face.

“They had guns.” Except for the third one.

She moves closer to him now. “I know.” She meets his gaze, but he can see that she’s watching the shotgun as well.

He glances at it again, and then back at her.

She turns and glances at the catamaran, which has now drifted out to sea.

“I’m not sick.” Her voice cracks with the desperation of broken glass.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I can’t go back.”

“I know.” He pauses, takes a slow breath to hold down the vomit.

“We have to wash the blood off of your hands,” she says.

They move down the beach a bit. Her pretty hands rub his in the freezing salt water. It’s no good, he thinks. There is blood on his pants, his shirt — everywhere.

He looks at the her face. “I killed your friends.”

She swallows hard. “They weren’t my friends.”

He could have let them in. He could have turned, looked the other way. But he didn’t.

“What do we do now?” she asks.

“I need to call Nathalie,” he says.

“I know.” She doesn’t ask who Nathalie is.