The Island - Part 4

by Michael Stark

  The only person who would end up thinking differently about me would be me. I couldn’t do it, not with unsuspecting campers spread out down the beach. They could tell me to go fuck myself. I could deal with that as long as I made the effort. To the best of my knowledge, fifteen people were scattered out between Portsmouth and the cabins at the southern point. That meant twenty-six people total on the island. Twenty-six could put up one hell of a better fight than eleven. We needed them and they needed us. I just had to make them understand how badly we needed each other.

  The dune buggy ghosted across the beach with the only sounds marking its passage coming from the low hum of the electric motor and the hiss of sand flying up behind the tires. The little vehicle sped along so quietly that twice in the first mile I had to swerve around shore birds to keep from running over them. For all the noise the buggy made, I could have simply been sitting in the sand, watching the sun rise and listening to the world sigh.

  I used a timer on my cell phone to gauge distance. At eight miles an hour, I needed the clock to tick over twenty-five minutes to be sure I’d covered the three miles I thought lay between the station and the first camp. I started scanning the tree line twenty minutes after I’d pulled out of the station. The sight of blackened timbers rising out of the sand ahead brought me up short. The old shipwreck lay at least a mile below the first camp.

  I brought the dune buggy into a tight turn and headed back, working the math in my mind as I drove. Seven minutes later, I let the buggy roll to a stop and climbed out, knowing I had to be in the right general area. I studied the beach, looking for any sign of human interaction—footprints, trash, anything that marked the presence of people, but saw nothing except sand, trees, and ocean.

  The wind finally pointed me in the right direction with the unmistakable sound of plastic rustling in the breeze. I studied the trees and nearly missed the tarp again. The dark-brown material blended so well with the shadows and exposed wood that if it hadn’t been for the straight line sliced across the jumbled backdrop of limbs and brush, I would have missed it entirely.

  I walked forward slowly, letting my eyes adjust and giving them time to make out the pieces of the puzzle. I’d once read that the reason illusions often work so well is because the mind tries to translate unfamiliar images into things it knows and understands. Our eyes supply the right information. When the brain can’t easily associate the incoming data with a known standard, it simply picks the nearest model. The condition related directly to how someone could walk through a room they’d been through a hundred times and not notice the new picture hanging on the wall.

  I could deal with letting my brain be tricked while looking at some silly optical illusion posted on a website or drawn into art. I had no intention of walking into anything on the island until I understood exactly what might be lying in front of me or, rather, what might be lying in wait. I didn’t care what mold my mind wanted to wrap around it. The tarp looked to be the last item still standing. The rest of the camp had been destroyed.

  Twenty feet away, I squatted down in the sand and pulled out one of Elsie’s cigarettes. For the next ten minutes or so, I smoked and studied the remains of the camp. Details came slow. Piles of clothes were strewn through the shade under the trees. Remnants of the tent had been scattered among them. One heap of clothing looked different. I looked it over carefully. An oddly shaped brown lump poked out from underneath what looked like a pair of jeans.

  It looked like a piece of wood from where I sat, but the shape didn’t fit. It curved where it should have run straight. The edge remained smooth where there should have been branches or at least the nubs of them. With so much debris lying back in the shadows, it could have been anything, maybe a shoe or piece of the tarp. But, neither the color nor the texture fit either of those guesses. Try as I might, I couldn’t fit the shape into a pattern I could recognize. Adding to the mystery, light glinted along the edge of the item in little mirror-like flashes.

  Nothing moved in the shadows or in the brush near the opening where the tent had been staked to the ground. While I watched, a blue jay flew up and landed in the tree above the tarp. His head flicked side to side a few times while he, like me, checked out his surroundings. After a few moments, he dropped out of the tree in a flash of color and pecked at something on the ground.

  I rose, walked back to the dune buggy and fished Gabriel’s revolver from the day pack. When I returned, the jay still hopped among the litter, his little black eyes constantly searching for food. The small bird also had spent life as both predator and prey. His senses were sharper than mine would ever be. If he felt safe enough to bounce along snapping up bugs, I reckoned I felt safe enough to poke around.

  Whatever had happened, Jim and Brittney had escaped the destruction. Two long tire tracks had been gouged out of the sand near the back of the tree where an old dirt road ran behind the dunes. Sand and clumps of mud had been flung out in a pattern that radiated toward the campsite, indicating they’d left in a hurry. Confirmation of that fact came when I walked over to the pile of clothes that had held my attention for so long. The strange brown lump turned out to be a huge chunk of marijuana stuffed in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. That discovery was as much of an eye-opener as anything else. Stoners might leave a mess behind on the beach, but they wouldn’t drive off without their stash unless they had a powerful reason to do so.

  Several useful items lay scattered about in the midst of the debris. I hesitated to go picking through them, acting like a post-apocalyptic scavenger until I knew what had happened to the pair. The camp had obviously been abandoned. That didn’t mean they would never return.

  I didn’t pack up the revolver when I returned to the dune buggy. Instead, I shed the jacket before I climbed in, laid it on the seat beside me and sat the pistol on top where it would be within easy reach. After seeing the makeshift home torn to shreds, I wanted the thing close.

  The cell phone went next to the gun, positioned so I could keep an eye on the time. No more than twenty minutes of driving should take me to the next stop.

  The washed-up wreck came and went with its dark skeletal ribs rising from the sand like the carcass of a giant dragon. The dune buggy slid along with barely a sound, eating up distance while the minutes ticked away. I had no trouble spotting the second camp. The big white Suburban sat near the dunes looking like Moby Dick had beached himself. Beside it, the Everest tent flapped merrily in the breeze.

  I took a deep breath. “Alright, Hill William,” I said out loud, using Elsie’s nickname on purpose. Somehow, making what I had to say sound as if it came from her gave the words a better chance of actually working.

  “No smartass comments and no confrontations. Be nice, even if it hurts.”

  Mr. Wall Street didn’t come out to meet me this time. In fact, other than the tent shuddering in the rising wind, nothing moved. Unlike the scattered mess I’d found at the doper’s camp, Eddie’s place looked as if it had been put together for a photo shoot. Even the sand appeared clean and tidy, with no twigs and leaves to mar the surface. I couldn’t imagine either of them bending down to pick up all the litter and wondered if the man had swept down the beach.

  I cut the power about fifty feet away from the tent and climbed out. The revolver went with me, tucked away in my pants pocket. As clean as it seemed, the situation felt wrong. The man had been vigilant and confrontational before, swaggering out across the sand to protect what he considered his territory. A few days could change an attitude, but not a personality. The urge to fight might have passed, but cautious and watchful were words that applied to one’s nature, not one’s emotions. The fact that I’d pulled up to their backdoor unchallenged left me uneasy. I moved closer and stopped to study the camp as I’d done thirty minutes earlier at the other site.

  I saw the man first, lying near the back of the Chevy with one leg splayed out at an awkward angle behind him. Eddie Bauer wasn’t sleeping. In fact, he wasn’t even intact. His body ended at the shoulders.
The dark splotch sprayed out across the sand where his head should have been drove home the grisly realization that there had been no fight. He had been decapitated where he stood as cleanly and effortlessly as if he had knelt to be executed.

  The pistol came out without conscious thought. I held it out in front of me and eased toward the scene. A slender, limp shape swinging in the shadows beyond materialized as I drew closer. I couldn’t make out the details, but what hung in the trees had the right shape and size to be the woman. The shape twirled slowly in the light air.

  The fact that the camp looked undisturbed except for the two bodies had the hair standing up on my arms. I couldn’t imagine such brutal deaths coming so fast, so effortlessly that not even the sand bore signs of a struggle. It was as if they’d either not had time to react or had been too terrified to move.

  Off to one side, a card table that doubled as a dinner table sat tidily arranged with chairs on opposite sites facing each other. Clean, bright plates had been carefully positioned on top. Both had shiny silverware placed arrow-straight beside them. A shotgun with a bore big enough to take down an elephant leaned against one of the chairs. The weapon gleamed in the light, looking as if it had just been cleaned. Beyond, towels hung from a line stretched between a poplar tree and the back of the Suburban. All looked freshly laundered and ready to be taken in. Ten feet away, near the tent, someone had built a fire ring. Beside it lay stacks of wood, each built into small pyramids.

  Nothing seemed amiss, even the shoes set outside the tent had been arranged in carefully placed pairs.

  Take out the bodies and anyone would have sworn the people were fishing or bird watching or involved in some other silly adventure. I stepped closer to get a better look at the body hanging in the tree.

  Baby had been gutted. A dark cavity speckled with white shards of bone filled the spot where her stomach had been. Her flesh had been sliced straight down the middle and the skin peeled back on either side. It took a minute for my eyes to focus enough to see how she’d been hung. Her intestines had been ripped free, twisted into a loop, and tightened around her neck. The cord stretched up in a thick gray hose-like line to a point higher in the tree where it had been looped around a heavy branch. How she could have been alive at that point, I don’t know, but the purple-black sheen on her face and the protruding tongue told me she’d strangled to death before her arteries could pump her dry.

  She had been wearing a nightshirt, with blue cloud-speckled pajama pants. The shirt hung in shreds. Each dangling sliver looked as if it had been tie-dyed at a slaughter house with the pure gossamer sheen of white at the top growing heavier and bloodier as it fell. Her breasts hung limp and exposed. Five deep gouges scored one white mound where claws had been ripped across her bare skin.

  She looked obscenely dead and grossly violated, left hanging in the shadows with bulging eyeballs rolled back in her head. They gleamed like two bright circles carved from the dark fabric of her skin. A circle of blackened sand lay beneath her where blood had spilled as if poured out of an oil drum.

  Something rustled in the bushes next to me. I jumped sideways, my nerves managing to feel as if they were both exploding and shattering in the same instant. Halfway through the twisting, mid-air turn, I leveled the pistol and pulled the trigger, more out of instinct and fear than intent. Sand that felt soft underfoot slammed hard against my back. Winded, spitting dirt, leaves, and God knows what else from the ground, I rolled and came up to my knees, one arm extended stiff and straight. At the end of it, the gun shook in a hand I couldn’t still.

  My thigh burned for some reason I couldn’t understand. I finally looked down and stared stupidly at the thin gash streaking down my leg. It took me a bit to realize that I’d nearly blown my leg off.

  A blackbird exploded out of the bushes and whipped by me in a dark blur. Air fluttered across my face from wings beating the air frantically as it sped away.

  “Fucking shit!” The words exploded out of my mouth. A string of curses followed, jumbled up in such a way that made no sense. A dry, scratching sound slid down through one of the trees. I jumped sideways in time to see a leaf tumble into the brush.

  I couldn’t stay in the sand, not down on my knees, not in such an unprotected position. I reached out to the card table to steady myself and noticed for the first time that the plates weren’t as clean and bright as I’d thought.

  Someone or some thing had scrawled a message across one of them, the words written in ink that had once flowed through the veins of the mutilated corpses behind me, an ink that had dried in dripping letters.

  “COME GET YOU WE LEE UM.”

  As much as I needed to run, I felt frozen in place, locked to the sand by the malevolent intent embodied by those four lonely words scrawled in blood. I had no idea what had written them, whether it had been a single creature or a swarm of them. I didn’t have a stalker. I didn’t have some hockey-masked madman slipping through the trees. I had a whole fucking army of fiendishly smart, toothy beasts crawling through the night whispering my name.

  I snatched up the shotgun and backed numbly out of the campsite, stumbling as if the ground was rising and falling beneath me. Halfway to the dune buggy, I turned and ran as if Satan himself floated along behind gleefully prodding me with his pitchfork. Eight miles an hour had felt relatively fast on the way down. Coming away from the Camp of Horrors, it felt like I was crawling along in a dream where every move seemed weighed down with molasses.

  The little vehicle finally made it well out into the open. I kept it near the edge of the surf, humming along as fast as it would go, twisting and turning, half-expecting to see something horribly big and monstrously fanged lurching along in my wake. Nothing came. The empty beach falling away behind me didn’t slow my pounding heart or ease the edge off jangling nerves. I wasn’t sure either would work in a normal fashion ever again.

  The wind came in stiff and cool off the ocean, drying sweat off my forehead I hadn’t even known was there. I fumbled through my shirt pocket and pulled out a cigarette with trembling fingers. Lighting it wasn’t easy, not with the wind and not with hands that shook like I had palsy. I felt like a junkie trying to get his fix, but too bogged down with the shakes to manage it. Finally, the end caught, the ember glowing a bright red-orange. Smoke filled my lungs and worked outward through the rest of my body with calming fingers. I burned two of them before anything resembling rational thought crept back in my mind.

  When it came, my mind immediately went back to the station. Watches had become boring and routine. I needed them to know that nights no longer connected to the word normal in any sense.

  I reached down, picked up the cell phone and punched in Elsie’s number. I’d loaded it into my phone that morning. She answered on the third ring.

  “Hill William?”

  “Yeah,” I said trying to keep my voice even. “Make sure the station is locked down tight at sunset. Make sure whoever is on watch understands this isn’t a game. Make sure they understand that outside that damned door is something they don’t want to meet and something they don’t want inside. Understand?”

  The line fell silent.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Hell no, I’m not okay and neither are the people down here.”

  I paused to let the image sink in. “Remember those Wall Streeters? They’re never going anywhere else again. I want that blasted station tighter than Fort Knox tonight.”

  “Are you listening to yourself?” she demanded. “You’re prancing off down the beach planning on staying in a cabin next to people you’ve never met. Did your mama teach you how to spell words like dumb and stupid, or do I need to find a box of crayons and draw them out for you?”

  “Just make sure the station is locked up tight,” I told her, refusing to argue. “I’ll be back tomorrow. You just have to understand, this is not someone else’s problem anymore. It’s here and damned if it isn’t bad.”

  I killed the connection before she had a chance to respond
and drove, watching my back as much as I watched the sand in front of me.

  Somewhere in the miles of open beach farther south, I had spotted a third camp when Angel had sailed past the first day. I never saw it. Dunes and ocean, dead reeds washed up on the beach and wading shorebirds, mackerel-scale clouds zooming by over head—those I saw plenty, but no camp. Where they had gone was anyone’s guess. I had no desire to venture off in the trees looking for them.

  Instead I drove, keeping the dune buggy on the hard pack next to the surf. Miles fled away beneath the tires, each one of them taking me a bit farther from the horror I’d witnessed. No amount of traveling could erase the image of the words scrawled across the plate. Distance and time might bring my blood pressure back to normal, but no matter how far I ran, that chilling message would haunt my thoughts.

  The little winged demon wouldn’t have been capable of hoisting the woman up in the tree. Nor could it have decapitated the man so efficiently. A score of them might have been able to lift the woman’s body. A thousand of them couldn’t have ripped the man’s head off without a fight. The camp had been too tidy for the slayings to have been an ambush of thousands. No, whatever had killed Mr. Wall Street had been big, mean, and ruthlessly efficient. Worse, the attacks on the two camps displayed methods completely at odds with each others. The first one had been torn apart, the tent ripped into shreds, and clothes flung about in rage as if determined to destroy anything associated with them. The second had demonstrated cunning and the ruthless intent of a stalking tiger.

  The manner in which Baby and her husband had been killed also displayed wide differences. The man appeared to have died quickly from what must have been an ambush, perhaps even with a single blow. The slaying of the woman, however, looked as if it had taken a while. The creature had enjoyed that one. The man’s death had been a quick and brutal attack. The woman’s had been a much slower, much more deliberate process. The cut that had opened her up from breast to pubic bone had no jagged or flayed edges. It looked like she’d been sliced open with a scalpel. The act of hanging her with her own intestines demonstrated a need in the beast to do more than kill her. It had wanted to see her suffer, wanted to see the pain and the terror. It had needed to see life fading from her eyes.