The Island - Part 4

by Michael Stark

  “What is it?”

  “I just wanted to tell you not to feel bad about the person you’ll kill,” he said softly. “They’re already dead.”

  Something moved in the shadows behind him. I looked beyond his pale features and saw Elsie standing near the staircase.

  She walked out and put her arm around the boy.

  “I told you. Going down the island is a bad idea.”

  The old woman pulled Daniel around and herded him back toward the stairs. She paused at the bottom. Her piercing gray eyes seemed to look right through me.

  “He says change is coming soon.”

  She glanced up the stairwell, apparently waiting for the boy to move out of sight. I listened for the sound of Daniel’s footsteps, but heard nothing. Finally, she turned and looked at me.

  “Don’t bring it back with you.”

  Chapter XVII - Days of Plenty

  I went looking for Joshua and Kate after the run-in with Daniel. I found them rummaging around a small house not far from the little beach where the kayakers had made their first camp. Kate looked hot and irritated. Joshua stood with his matted hair blowing in the wind. Elsie had picked a good nickname for him. Every time I saw the man, he looked ready to pull out a staff and part the Red Sea. Both had scores of red splotches on their arms and faces from mosquito bites.

  A Craftsman riding mower sat on the grass next to them with a small utility trailer hitched up behind it. I imagine the little trailer had hauled its share of grass clippings and leaves. At the moment, it rode low, its interior filled with hand tools and cans of food. A box of cereal sat on top.

  “We found the ranger station,” he said when I drew close. “I don’t know about bringing the generator back though.”

  “Why not?”

  He leaned his head to one side to let the wind blow hair away from his face. “Well, it looks like it’s wired in for one thing. There’s a start button inside the station. I tried it. The generator fired up without a hitch and powered up the lights.”

  “But?” I asked, knowing there had to be one if he didn’t want to move the generator to the station.

  He made a wry face. “But, our place isn’t wired for it and we couldn’t find enough gas to make it worthwhile. There’s a tank out back just like the kerosene tank in the summer kitchen. It’s almost empty. We found a plastic gas can in the little shed where we found the mower. Between it and the tank, I’d guess three or four gallons tops.”

  “How big is the place?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Not big enough for all of us. It’s like a one-bedroom house. The shed had the lawn mower, that little trailer, a few other odds and ends. There’s a chainsaw if we need it.”

  He pointed to the trailer. “We figured we’d bring the trailer back. If nothing else, we can use it to ferry things back to the station. We brought all the food we could find. Wasn’t much. Kate scored some stuff though.”

  The last sentence came with a grin.

  The girl shot him an angry look. “He thinks things like deodorant, shampoo, and hand cream aren’t very useful.”

  She brushed a limp strand of hair out of her eyes. Her face was flushed and sweat beaded on her forehead. “I cleaned out the medicine cabinet. The ranger had a first aid kit too. I brought it as well.”

  Joshua rolled his eyes. “Hand cream, that’s right up there on the top of the survival list.”

  His eyes brightened. “We did find some furniture. There’s an old sofa across from the desk out front. The bedroom had an easy chair in it. As soon as I can round up the other guys, we’ll bring both back to the station.”

  “How about the houses?“

  Joshua shrugged. “As far as we can tell, they’ve been cleaned out and locked up. They’re just shells.”

  I couldn’t be disappointed with the items stacked in the utility trailer. Raiding the ranger station had given us a method of transporting items between the houses in the village and a few more supplies. At the same time, nothing I saw left me feeling elated either. The items they were gathering would help, but none would save us.

  I left them and headed up the hill, following the tree line as I went. Somewhere, a dirt road led back toward the interior of the island. I found it about twenty yards behind the dunes. The instant I stepped inside the trees, the world changed. Little sunlight filtered through the dense canopy overhead. The air lay still and stagnant, so heavy I could feel the humidity from my own sweat evaporating off my face. Mosquitoes buzzed in my ears and swarmed along every inch of exposed skin. The brief flutter of tiny bloodsuckers swooping in for dinner preceded the quick pinprick of snout shoved into flesh in what felt like a thousand different spots. I looked down and had to fight the urge to run back out into the open. My T-shirt looked as if someone had poured rough ground pepper across the front.

  I swiped them away as best I could and moved deeper, my gaze locked on the ground. The sandy lane might not be the best road in the world, but it offered a unique look at the island wildlife. The track-trap stretched fifteen feet wide and ran twenty-two miles from point to point. Anything passing through the loose sand would leave signs as clear as words printed on a page.

  Twenty minutes later, I burst out onto the beach and ran toward the ocean, ripping my shirt off as I went. A few feet away from the breakers, I stopped and used the rolled up shirt like a mop to wipe away the mosquitoes. I don’t know how many there were. It felt like millions. Every swipe across my skin came away thick with little black bodies.

  I’d found what I needed to find. Deer and birds big enough to be turkey roamed the interior. A clue to how they survived on an island with no major water sources came at the edge of dunes a quarter mile inside the trees. A damp spot in the sand had been pawed away leaving a small hole full of insect-infested water. Here and there, seeps trickled from the foot of the sandy hills. The interior probably hosted pools of brackish water as well. The supply wouldn’t support a large population but, if push came to shove, we could hunt enough to make it through the winter

  I damned well wasn’t going to do it without slathering myself with Deet and waiting for cold weather though.

  The beach felt too good to leave after the thick air inside the trees. I stayed close to the surf on the way to the point, reveling in the feel of the wind and the freedom from the torturous swarms of ear-buzzing mosquitoes and eye-clogging gnats. I’d never seen such a stark demarcation between ecosystems. Fifty yards away from what felt like a tropical paradise lay a completely different world, one shut off from light, from the wind, and packed with every creepy-crawly imaginable. The memory of my shirt moving when I looked down left me shuddering as thoroughly as the idea of little demons calling out my name.

  Tyler had worked his way a hundred yards down the inlet by the time I arrived. Denise sat in the sand watching him, the cast net and bait bucket beside her.

  “How’d you do?”

  She made a face. “The little bucket is full. That net is a lot of work. My arms feel like wood.”

  I grinned at her. I knew what she meant. My dad had turned me loose as a kid with a cooler tied to a belt loop and trailing behind me. With its ring of lead weights sewn into the edge, the net weighed about ten pounds. Thirty minutes of toting the thing around held in casting position was enough to tax the arms of a body builder.

  She tossed her ever-present ponytail. “I saw a lot of oyster beds out in the bay. Can we eat those?”

  I scratched at my head, unsure how to answer her.

  “I suppose so,” I said finally. “I’ve always been told you can eat oysters in months that have an “R” in them, and to avoid anything that came out of the water at low tide. I’d check with Elsie, but as far as I as know, yes.”

  Her eyes flashed excitedly. “Good. Then Tyler and I can take the kayaks out and gather up a lot of them. My dad grew up in New Orleans. We had oysters on the grill all the time. They’re good.”

  “Oysters on the grill?”

  She nodded. “Spr
inkle some garlic over them. Add a little butter or lemon and wow. My dad used to say that if you didn’t like them, you weren’t human.”

  The recipe sounded good enough to send me back toward Joshua and Kate. He frowned when he saw me pulling a rake off the trailer.

  “What’s up?”

  “Dinner,” I told him and headed back to the beach. I spent the next couple of hours raking clams from the edge of the water. By late afternoon, I had my bucket nearly full. Tyler had pulled in several good-sized flounder along with a few whiting and a small redfish. Denise added about two pounds of shrimp to the mix, along with what had to be half a bushel of oysters. We lugged the haul up to the station where Elsie clapped her hands in delight.

  “Oh my God, we will eat like kings tonight!” she exclaimed.

  All four of us took part in the cleaning. Denise shucked oysters like a pro. I deveined the shrimp. Elsie took Tyler aside and demonstrated her prowess at cleaning fish. We left the clams in the bucket after dousing them with salt water. They would go in a pot later. We had no garlic, but I’d seen plenty of it growing wild around the station. I’d always thought the straight green stalks to be wild onions. A botanist friend of Jayne’s had rectified that misconception, looking at me like I needed a dunce cap and belonged in a corner before sighing, “That’s garlic, dummy.”

  I’d let the comment slide, partly because I felt like a dummy and partly because I couldn’t think of an eloquent way to say asshole.

  While we worked, Joshua came up the hill on the riding mower, wild hair streaming in the wind. A large leather sofa rode behind him, mounted precariously on the utility trailer. Keith and Devon walked on either side to balance it.

  Elsie stood up and shaded her eyes against the sun. “Why, Moses is bringing us a couch!”

  He shot us a grin as he passed.

  “We’re going back for the easy chair and a few other things as soon as we get this unloaded,” he shouted over the roar of the motor.

  I headed for the beach with a bar of soap once we’d finished prepping for dinner. Tyler and Denise followed along behind. I loved seafood. I didn’t love the smell of it all over my hands while I was trying to eat. Plus, I wanted a freaking bath. The station and its paltry ration of cold water washed away the grime, but left me feeling like I’d bathed with a sponge. I wanted water and lots of it. The ocean would leave a trace of salt. That I could wash away with my self-allotted gallon of cold water back at the station.

  I got ten minutes in waist deep water. We spent the next half hour watching a huge fin cruise up and down the beach. Tyler had spotted it coming up from behind. I knew enough about the sharks in those waters to suspect the dark gray triangle sticking almost a foot above the surface belonged to a hammerhead. They liked to drift along close to the surface in shallow waters. I commented on that fact.

  Tyler picked up a shell and flung it out in front of the beast.

  “I don’t care what kind it is,” he said. “That thing has to be fifteen feet long.”

  Eventually the passing swells lifted the giant body up enough that we could see the distinctive and alien-looking head. Denise sat between us. Rather than change into a bathing suit, she had simply dropped her shorts and waded into the water in her panties. She joked that he could go swimming by himself the next time he had fish blood all over him.

  We all laughed, but the fin running back and forth no more than a hundred feet from the edge of the water offered a sobering reminder that we didn’t need monsters or diseases to end up fertilizing flowers in the little cemetery.

  Denise had brought a towel. She headed back toward the station wearing nothing but soaked panties and a towel around her top. Tyler shot me a look with his eyebrows raised so high they disappeared completely in the wet mop of hair plastered to his head.

  She looked back and grinned at the two of us, stopping for a moment just ahead. Suddenly the world seemed small and the air close and hot. Denise sat squarely in the same section of my brain most of the younger people had occupied since we’d met, namely the portion where I didn’t spend a great deal of time thinking about any of them. My outlook where they were concerned occupied a clean and neat corner where simplicity reigned.

  They were, at least in my mind, my responsibility. Most thoughts ventured into the land of caricatures with each impression done in bold strokes. All of them had their quirks, specific features that accompanied thoughts about them, personality traits that created my own stereotypes. Devon came across as petty and irritating, with Keith his polar opposite and arguably the one I liked most out of the bunch. When Denise came to mind, the image that formed had two components—ponytails and sweatshirts, not a half-dressed woman who had wet hair hanging down her back and looked like she had just stepped off the cover of Sports Illustrated.

  “How about we walk in front?” I said. “Maybe that will keep Tyler from tripping over his feet.”

  The younger man took a swipe at my arm. I ducked around to one side of her while he went by on the other. She was still grinning when I looked back.

  I slogged through the loose sand ahead of her with Tyler at my side.

  “Jesus,” I said under my breath. “All I need is for Joshua to see his girlfriend waltzing back from the beach half naked with two guys.”

  Tyler chuckled beside me. “You don’t know? They’re on the outs. Moses has been going a little too nature-boy for everyone, including her. I swear if he grows any more hair, I won’t be sure if it’s him walking through the door or a Bigfoot.”

  I looked up at his comment. “The old vet on Ocracoke told me Bigfoot was real.”

  The younger man shrugged. “What isn’t? Every time we listen to the news it’s full of demons, ogres, fairies, and trolls. I’m good with a big hairy ape-like man running through the woods. He’s not as scary as the rest.”

  Dinner was, as Elsie had predicted, fit for a king. Denise cooked the oysters, insisting on a wood fire outside. Somewhere in the scrounging, she had come up with the grate to a grill. She positioned it over the fire and let the oysters steam in their own shell with slices of wild garlic and butter. The things were, mildly put, incredibly addictive.

  Elsie had steamed the clams open in a pot and then added a sauce that tasted of butter cream and lemon. I looked around, wondering where she’d gotten the fruit. I’d brought a small sack of lemons across on Angel, but they had long since disappeared.

  She pointed down the hill. “That’s lemon balm. People here used to grow it for the flavor and as a medicine. It grows wild all over the place now.”

  The old woman had pan-seared the fish and glazed it with a combination of honey and a touch of whiskey. Atop that lay a crunchy dusting of something that tasted of toasted nuts and bread.

  “Walnuts,” Elsie remarked when she saw me licking the crust off my fork.

  Denise hadn’t caught many shrimp. Rather than parcel them out, Elsie had built another of her free-range salads, only this one came with chunks of bacon and small bits of boiled shrimp. The dressing tasted like bacon and honey-mustard all rolled together.

  “Where do you find this stuff?” I asked around a mouthful.

  She shrugged. “You’re eating dandelion, kudzu, polk, and wild lettuce. There’s a few mint leaves in there as well and what was left of the walnuts. The plants are all over. The problem is finding new shoots. Much of what’s out there is too tough to eat this time of year.”

  The old woman watched me shovel another helping in my mouth. “Fancy places call that a wilted green salad. That’s how they get around telling customers they poured bacon grease over their greens. I added a little mustard and honey to it for flavor.”

  The recipe sounded gross, but the flavor bordered on heavenly.

  “Where’d you get the bacon?”

  “Charlie had sent over a side in one of them sacks,” she explained. “It’ll last us a while if we go easy on it.”

  Kate raised her head, looking confused. “You don’t need to refrigerate it?”
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  Elsie waved her fork dismissively. “I’ll treat it like we used to treat hams when we cured them. I’ll roll it around in some sea salt and cut off the black now and then. The rest will be good.”

  By the time the last fork clinked on a plate, the looks around the table went beyond satisfaction and ventured into the land of hope. I knew why. The idea of living off the land could be scary. The fact that 90 percent of what we’d just eaten had come from the sea painted the image of a long, cold winter in somewhat brighter terms. I could have rained on that thought by reminding them that many of the fish would be gone soon. But, as much as I needed the bright spot, they needed it worse. The days had brought little cheer and the news nothing but gloom and doom. Hope might be the only thing we had left in a few weeks. I didn’t feel like driving a stake through its heart at the dinner table.

  Maybe because the dinner had gone so well, no one seemed eager to turn on the radio for what had become our evening glimpse into the outside world. Elsie shot a glance at it as if she might reach for it. I poked her and pointed to the porch. She followed me out and we spent the last minutes of daylight smoking and watching gold from the dying sun gild the waves washing in on the beach.

  Our nightly routine had most going to bed early. We simply didn’t have the resources in terms of light to support doing much of anything else. When Elsie and I walked back in, Keith had one of the old oil lamps sitting in the middle of the dinner table. Warm yellow light spilled across the room.

  “It seems to work just as well with kerosene as whale oil,” he said when he saw me looking at the clear liquid in the base.

  The extra light breathed new life into the station. We sat up late, telling stories of life before the island. When my turn came, I talked about wind chimes, how I tuned them, how I worked the metal, and why I loved listening to the wind make music for me.

  One by one, voices worked their way around the table. Elsie turned out to be a natural storyteller. She drew a poignant image of the island and its people in ways that not only brought them to life, but also offered a glimpse into what might be our near future. I looked around at one point and had never seen such rapt gazes. Even skittish and easily bored Devon looked like he had fallen into the same mesmerized trance as the others.