Phoenix Island Read Online Free Page B

and also to the Old Man, whom you are not yet ready to meet. I will not subject his eyes to such unwashed rabble.”
    She stared at them for several seconds, surveying their faces. Gunfire rattled in the distance.
    “You will have no contact with the outside world,” Oteka said. “No phone calls. No texts. No email. No letters. No news. No music, television, or internet.” She raked her hard gaze over their ranks. “The world will move on without you. No one there knows where you are, and no one cares. Phoenix Island is your only home.” She gestured toward the drill sergeants. “We are your only family.”
    She spoke to the soldiers, who formed a line and stood, legs apart, chins out, hands behind their backs.
    “Drill Sergeant Parker,” Oteka said. “Please demonstrate my sincerity.”
    Skull-and-Crossbones offered the formation a big smile, then walked past the line of sergeants, dumping the contents of a green bag. Cell phones, MP3 players, and games clattered to the pavement.
    A quiet murmur ran through the ranks.
    “Isolation!” Oteka said, and her men started stomping the devices into the ground. Screens shattered; phones snapped; iPods twisted and split. Around Carl, kids gasped and groaned, hissed and whispered, scowled and wept.
    For Carl, who’d never owned electronics, this destruction wasn’t of personal concern, but it was another in a sequence of danger signs. What concerned him most of all was the opening of First Sergeant Oteka’s speech: You are all orphans. Why had they taken only orphans? He thought of the kick he had received, the rough handling of Davis. He glanced around. Here they were, on Phoenix Island, somewhere outside of the United States and its laws.
    We’re as dead to the world as our parents, Carl thought. These people can do anything to us.

C ARL CLIMBED INTO THE LONG, open flatbed of one of the cattle trucks and found himself once again next to the small kid. Oh well, maybe it was time to make a friend—even one who told horrible jokes.
    The kid smiled. “You survived.”
    “For now,” Carl said. He felt like he’d gone fifteen rounds against a heavyweight.
    “They took my PSP.” The kid cursed and curled his small hands into talons. “Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get that thing?”
    Carl shrugged. “Pretty hard, I guess.”
    “Only six hours every Saturday for about a million years.” He shook his head. “I wore a chicken suit and stood at this busy intersection, waving a Chicken Hut sign.”
    “Ouch,” Carl said, chuckling a little.
    “Ouch isn’t the half of it. This kid Dan Carville—he worked at the pet shop next to Chicken Hut—told everybody at school, and—”
    “No prom for you.”
    “Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. No prom for me.” The kid grinned. “I got so bored standing there in that chicken suit, I used to curse at everybody driving by. They couldn’t hear me. I’d yell the worst thing I could think of, and some dumb woman would beep and wave like it was roses. It was pretty funny.” He chuckled, but then his smile faded. “Now my PSP is in a thousand pieces.”
    Carl nodded his head. “Better your video game than your ribs.”
    “Sorry. It’s pretty lame, complaining about my stuff when you were getting kicked like that. You okay?”
    “Yeah. I’ve been in some pretty rough places, and sometimes staff would yell, push you up against the wall, stuff like that. But this? I didn’t know they could hit us.”
    The kid spread his palms. “I figure we’re somewhere in the Pacific, off the western coast of Mexico. You know why they build places like this outside the US, right? So they can do whatever they want without worrying about us suing them later. Whatever. Not much we can do about it now. My name’s Neil, by the way. Neil Ross.”
    “Carl Freeman.” They shook. Ross’s hand was small and sweaty, but Carl didn’t care. At last, he had something like a friend. Here on Phoenix Island, that mattered, even if