The Island
Part 4
by
Michael Stark
PUBLISHED BY: Michael Stark
The Island - Part 4
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Stark
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the author’s written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
Forward:
This is Part 4 of The Island. If you’ve not read the earlier parts, go grab them first.
If you can’t find them, come visit me at http://www.michael-stark.com/ for a list of places where you can read them free.
MS
Chapter XVI - Preparations
We buried him at the little cemetery next to Zachary. The two mounds of freshly turned earth looked out of place amid the tottering old gravestones. I stood next to Elsie while Keith and Devon covered the body, trying to decide what I’d missed.
Everything looked as right as we could make it. The people spread out in a loose semi-circle stood hushed and still. Jessie had even dug up enough black to dress for the occasion.
A warm breeze slipped through the trees. Across the ground, splotches of sunlight and shadow played tag in rhythm with the swaying branches. Where the underbrush thinned, snatches of a sparkling turquoise-blue ocean glinted in the distance. Leaves rustled overhead. Even the slightest surge in the wind sent scores of them wafting toward the earth in lazy showers of red and gold.
Gabriel had picked a fine day to die. Autumn had dressed the world in the most vibrant shades as if commemorating his passing. The simple act of lifting my eyes left me feeling like I’d not only found the end of a rainbow, but had stepped inside of it. As pretty as it was, the sight of fall in all its glory stood as a harbinger of things to come. When the leaves were gone, the cold would come and winter would seize the island in its icy grip. Life would grow tougher and leaner. We would too. If we didn’t, we’d be digging more graves.
Elsie had even given the man a short and surprisingly eloquent send-off, despite the fact that she seemed as jittery as the others. I doubt many funerals had guests watching the tree line or jumping occasionally at shadows, but not many had the cause of death listed as “Killed by Monster” either.
I stood as silent as the rest, trying to focus on the ceremony, but wrestling with the odd feeling that an answer lay in front of me if I could only figure out the question. While the rest seemed appropriately solemn, I grew increasingly frustrated, like I had all the parts to a Rebus puzzle, but couldn’t quite put them in the right order.
The group broke apart on the way back with the younger folks trudging ahead while I stayed back with Elsie.
“You looked awfully preoccupied,” she noted on the way back to the station.
Daniel loped along a few feet away, his face empty. I still didn’t know how to take him, and couldn’t decide if he was more demon child or simple prognosticator. Even though I’d dreamed it, the image of his head swiveling around on his body wouldn’t leave my mind. He’d done nothing evil. Yet simply standing next to him could raise the hair on my arms. In some ways, I felt sorry for him. Everyone at the station avoided him as best they could. Watching the others skirt their way around the boy reminded me of people poking through tall weeds where a snake had just disappeared. They did it gingerly and nervously.
I pulled my eyes away from him.
“I was,” I said to Elsie. “I’m going down to the southern end of the island. I counted nine people on the beach the day we passed. There’s at least six or seven more in between.”
“Not today. It’s too late,” she said without breaking her stride.
“Elsie, the people out in the open don’t stand a chance. I can’t just let them die,” I argued. “Besides, I want to check on the cabins on the other side. We may be able to move down there and save ourselves a lot of work.”
“I said not today, Hill William,” she said sharply.
I shot her a cautious glance. She stared straight ahead, her face tight. Elsie had drawn her gray hair back in a bun for the funeral. If she’d had a floor-length linen dress and a pair of boots, she would have looked like Granny Clampett stomping along beside me.
Gabriel’s suicide had shocked everyone. Elsie seemed to have taken it worse than the rest. I hadn’t helped the situation when I described the visit to Ocracoke. The stunned expressions had started at disbelief, ventured over into denial, and then migrated toward horror when they realized what he meant by growing claws. Life grew more complicated with each passing day. We didn’t just have to scrounge for food and worry about a disease. Survival had taken on a whole new meaning. Famine and disease might eventually kill us all if we lived long enough to die a natural death. Increasingly, it seemed we had better odds of serving as dinner.
Stress ate at everyone. I could see it in their faces. Elsie had seemed impassive through much of it, weathering the news and the events better than most. Even so, the constant threat of something hungry lurking behind the next bush had to be taking a toll on the old woman.
The time seemed good to change the topic.
“How’s the water supply?”
She shook her head.
“Not good. The barrel is down to a half. We need rain.”
“How about food?”
She sighed. “Better now. I had Keith and Tyler go down and get the other sack along with the chickens. Charlie threw in a lot of basics: beans, flour, rice, and canned goods. We can stretch another ten days on what we have.”
The old woman looked up at me.
“It won’t be fine eatin’ though. Charlie was old-school. These youngsters ain’t going to like the country cookin’ as much as you and me.”
“And don’t go givin Keith any jobs,” she said in a stubborn tone. “I got him buildin’ me a chicken coop.”
“Damn it, Elsie, will you pick one personality out of your schizophrenic line-up and stick with it?” I asked, only half-joking. I could never predict what might come out of her mouth. One moment she enunciated her words with the finest. The next she sounded like a comedian poking fun at Southern dialects.
She pulled up short and looked over her glasses. “What are you talking about, Hill William?”
“There you go again,” I said in exasperation. “The last two sentences out of your mouth sound like they came from different people. One is an English teacher. The other is a farm girl.”
She threw her head back and laughed.
“The real me is the farm girl,” she finally said. “The other one is who I learned to be.”
I looked at her expectantly.
“I bought out the General Merchandise when I moved back to Atlantic,” she said. “Before that, I had a boss. I didn’t need him thinking I was dumb because of my accent.”
“Did you really work for the FBI?”
“I really did, Hill William. They said I was a natural.”
“A natural at what?”
She studied me for a moment. “People. Now if you’re through, let’s get back and get some food on the table. I’m hungry and I’m tired.”
Lunch turned out to be canned meat on rough bread. Elsie whipped up both from one of the sacks that Charlie had sent. The drink of choice turned out to be instant tea, a lukewarm abomination in which little tea could be found. The concoction mostly tasted like lemon juice stirred into dirty water. I cringed at the flavor and glanced back toward the kitchen. A can of dry powder sat on the corner of the bar. Fever or not, if I made it
off the island, I had a lawsuit to file. They could hire all the high-dollar lawyers they wanted. Once they’d finished explaining that the insult they had fostered upon both consumers and tea-pickers actually tasted good, I’d pass out samples.
Hell, I wouldn’t even need a lawyer, just a pickup truck full of pitchforks and torches.
Elsie brought me out of the revenge-laced fantasy when she flicked on the radio. I looked up to a table full of glum faces. We sat by as the Three Dog Night extolled the virtues of traveling to Shambala, a place the world needed, but didn’t look as if it would visit any time soon. The dry and distinctive rattle of shuffling papers filled the airwaves when the music died away. After a few moments of static, followed by the newscaster whispering to someone in the background, Elton John painted a lonely picture of Norma Jean flickering like a candle in the wind.
Uncertain looks slid around the table, a few of them tinged with fear. I knew how they felt. Every time we turned on the radio, what jumped out painted a scene of death and horror that no one could have foreseen. Yet, Christine had also become our rock in many ways, the one spot in our day that offered certainty and the last tie to a life it seemed we would never see again. Her clear, calm voice brought a sense of order to the chaos and offered a glimpse back to days when my biggest worries revolved around paying bills and trying to decide which restaurant would get my dinner dollar.
I picked up my sandwich and headed for the stairs. Elsie frowned at me when I rose. I had no answers for the questioning look on her face or for anything else. When voices came back they would either dole out more gloom and more doom or give me a whole new set of reasons to feel shitty. The odd feeling from the gravesite still hung heavy on my thoughts and seemed a relief in comparison. We had missed something. What, I didn’t know. The only certainty in my mind pointed to the fact that Christine Arapaloe wouldn’t tell me.
I clumped and creaked my way up the old staircase and paused at the landing. The station breathed life once again. The drawers on the old chests overflowed with clothing. The dormitory section highlighted not only the presence of people, but the differences between them. Keith had made his bed with military precision. A pair of boots stood at attention under his bunk with heels and toes touching. Devon’s bunk looked like he’d held a block party on it the night before. Clothes draped across the abbreviated headboard. Shoes lay scattered out beside it. His sleeping bag slipped off one side of the bed and hung to the floor.
The rest of the bunks occupied a space somewhere between the two extremes. Most would leave a mother sighing and a drill sergeant cursing, but neither could deny that the dusty old attic had returned to the land of the living.
I turned and walked down the hall toward the sick room. Light poured in from the dormer window, drawing a bright rectangle across the bed. Someone had tried to clean up the blood and only partially succeeded. The old boards evidently didn’t surrender stains well. A dark splotch roughly the size of Gabriel’s torso marked the spot where he’d lain as clearly as chalk marked a crime scene. Next to the bed, a pair of syringes lay atop a small table beside the bottle of Ketanest. I had brought both up in case he woke in agony. The anesthetic hadn’t been designed as a pain killer, but we had nothing else.
The jacket I’d worn the night before hung from a nail near the window. The handle of Gabriel’s revolver poked from one pocket. I made a mental note to remove both the needles and the gun before I left. Daniel might act comatose half the time, but he was still six years old. I didn’t need him playing with either.
The instant the thought slid across my mind, a new piece to the mystery fell into my lap. The baffling combination of images swirled across my thoughts like the rest of the day’s oddities. I looked at the remains of the broom lying next to the stain on the floor and let my gaze travel up, across the drugs to the gun. The equation appeared to be simple. Yet, the question mark at the end of it seemed larger than ever. Guns and drugs had proven to be constants in many deaths around the world where cash flowed like a river and addictions consumed people as fiercely as any monster. None of that applied here. Gabriel had killed himself, and had chosen a broomstick as his weapon of choice.
That thought struck me harder than anything else. The thin shaft of wood had been a conscious choice. He’d asked Kate to sweep the room and then leave the broom behind.
Why?
I had no answer for that question or why someone would start growing claws in the first place. I didn’t know how a woman could cling to a vertical surface with nothing but her fingers and toes, much less why shoving a religious medallion down her throat would cause her to burst into flames.
The more I thought about it, the more my head ached. Finally, I gave up and walked back down the stairs. Elsie and the rest still sat at the kitchen table. She motioned me over.
“They’re just getting started with the news. They’ve been having trouble with the wire services,” she explained and waved toward the empty seat I’d left behind.
I slid into the chair with a sigh as Christine Arapaloe’s voice filtered through the speakers. She sounded tired and exasperated.
I need to offer my apologies to our listeners. This has to be the first newscast I’ve ever given where the copy came off my cell phone. The broadcast may sound a little disjointed today. We’re just picking headlines at random so bear with us. Hopefully, we’ll have the situation in hand by this evening.
Let’s get to the cause of all the problems first. A cold front pushing down from Canada has been spawning severe thunderstorms on a line from Pennsylvania down through the Ohio Valley and into Tennessee. Utility companies throughout the eastern half of the country are reporting widespread outages and saying it may be weeks before power is returned to all customers. An anonymous source from Edison Electric highlighted the problems facing power companies when he noted that a reduced workforce and the new travel restrictions would play a key role in determining how long it took to return service to affected areas.
Adding to the misery, downed trees have blocked many roadways and localized heavy rains have produced flooding conditions in several states. Officials are advising residents ahead of the front who live in low lying or flood prone areas to seek higher ground. Storms have dumped as much as three inches of rain in a single hour, submerging roadways, washing away bridges, and flooding homes. Sections of West Virginia have been particularly hard hit, with several counties already asking to be declared as disaster areas.
Lightning strikes in northern Kentucky ruptured an underground natural gas line causing a series of explosions near the Cincinnati International Airport. One resident noted that the fireball looked like someone had dropped a nuclear bomb on the airport. Several buildings were destroyed and fires are still burning in a dozen others.
The woman paused for a moment. “Sorry. I’m having to read these to report them. Here’s one I’m sure is on everyone’s mind. This is from Reuters.”
Military officials defended containment measures saying that the actions would eventually save lives. The statement, released by General David Brukhauser’s office, called on residents to stay in their homes and avoid contact with others. He noted that several weeks may pass before the quarantine is effective in severing the virus from its need for new hosts. Brukhauser appealed for calm and said that planners were working day and night on plans to deliver food and medical supplies to the newly drawn community blocks.
The American Medical Association contradicted the military’s stance, saying that infection and mortality rates appear to be increasing rapidly. AMA spokesman, Jonathan Mays, told Reuters News in a phone interview that the scope of the disaster would not be fully understood for years and that we could potentially be poised on the edge of an extinction-level event. When asked to explain, Mays said that efforts to find a cure for the disease continued, but the virus’s apparent ability to mutate at will had frustrated researchers leaving potential cures useless before they ever left the lab. “We have two truths in front of us,” he s
aid simply. “The first is that we have millions, if not billions, of active infections spanning the globe right now. The second is, this disease will run its course before we understand it enough to fight it.”
Another round of silence hissed from the old radio. “Hang with me,” the woman finally said. “I’m looking through headlines. Here’s one called Battle Lines.”
Riot police and military units were overwhelmed last night near Rome as crowds estimated in the tens of thousands demonstrated against quarantine policies enacted by the Italian government. Scenes from the capital this morning show scores of bodies lying among burning buildings and overturned cars. Similar events played out in countries across Europe, prompting one commentator to note that if Nero were alive today, he could fiddle while the continent burned.
Closer to home, demonstrations in New York City turned violent last night when members of the newly created Containment Authority used tear gas to disperse crowds, some of which had swelled to thousands. The protests, organized by a coalition of residents, had been intended as a peaceful march to highlight the lack of services and food. When asked why he risked infection, one man said that if supplies didn’t reach the city soon, he would starve before he had a chance to catch The Fever.
Another series of demonstrations sparked gunfire in San Diego last night. Protesters had gathered between Anthony’s Seafood Grotto and an old sailing ship, the Star of India, when at least two people in the crowd pulled weapons and fired upon Containment Authority peacekeepers. Fourteen people were killed in the ensuing melee as demonstrators fled and authorities returned fire.
A massive brawl erupted in downtown Albuquerque, New Mexico yesterday afternoon. Citizens had lined up not far from Garcia’s Mexican Kitchen to partake in Bernalillo County’s food assistance program. City and county officials had announced their own drive earlier this week to feed hungry residents and positioned a distribution point near the corners of four community blocks. The initial confrontation began when one woman accused another of entering the line again after receiving her allotted portion. The shouting match quickly spread as bystanders took sides. Twenty-eight people were injured in the fracas. Thirteen were arrested.
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