The Island - Part 4
Page 6
Then it had taken the time to leave me a message and did so without disturbing the camp. The words etched in blood had stood out in stark contrast to plates set tidy and neat. The effect had been shocking, but it rode atop a more sinister warning. The beast had killed for the sheer pleasure of killing. It had taken nothing, wanted nothing other than to destroy the two people it had stalked.
What I couldn’t understand was how it knew my name? How did it even know I existed? Even more, why did it know my name and what in the hell had it pissed at me? Try as I might, I could find no answers for any of those questions. My life had been quintessentially and extraordinarily normal for the most part. I had no inexplicable events, no alien visitors, no séances, and no monsters creeping by my window at night casting great shadows on my bedroom wall. I’d never seen a ghost, never heard unexplained voices, never dabbled in mystic arts, and was as precognitive as a stump. Nothing in my past pointed to any event that would have scrawled my name atop Hell’s most-wanted list. The thought conjured up images of little demons circulating a "Wanted dead, not alive" poster with my picture on the front and the word WEE-LEE-UM emblazoned below it.
Two weeks before, the world had made sense. The outlook hadn’t been bright. There were no silver linings in the clouds gathered on the horizon, but I understood it. Now, nothing made sense, not even the disease. No infection in human history had ever demonstrated the ability to evolve so quickly that within weeks, the infected were fighting their caregivers.
Add to it the appearance of creatures that strained the limits of credulity and life had ventured past difficult into the realm of strange. History had plenty of ghost stories, demons, ogres, and giants tucked away in its legends, but never in a believable sense. Folklore and myth often had its roots in a real event or a real person, but real people couldn’t fly, had never slain dragons, and had never been chased around islands by a Cyclops. The fantastic details had sprung from imaginations huddled around campfires and hoping for daylight.
But, I had faced a demon and fought something else just as vile in Angel’s cabin. I could still feel her claws raking my sides. I had buried a man ten miles north whose leg I cut off because one of them ate the bottom nearly clean of flesh. I’d just left a campsite where a woman still hung with her own intestines forming the hangman’s noose.
Sense? The world had none left. It was as if every fear, every imagined horror that ever crept through the mind of man, had been set free.
And the friggin’ things knew my name. Why did they know my name? Why not Joshua’s or Keith’s or some man in New Jersey who went by Frank Frazzouli? What the hell had I ever done to deserve such an honor?
The questions kept coming and piling up with no answers. The only thing I knew for certain was that the basic assumptions that served as the building blocks for society no longer held true. Security had long been recognized as one of humanity’s basic needs. That cornerstone had evaporated in the last week. No one could take security for granted any longer. The police couldn’t provide it. The army couldn’t. No Black Ops helicopters were going to appear out of the sky and blow away the bad guys. The Cavalry wasn’t coming. They couldn’t. They were too busy dying from a disease no one understood.
Mile after mile slid away. The clouds overhead had thickened until they threatened to obliterate the sun. It hung small and hazy in the sky, barely strong enough to beat through the overcast. The wind had grown stronger as well, pushing taller and steeper waves against the coast.
Just short of eleven a.m., I pulled up on a small rise and climbed out to stretch the kinks out of my legs and to check the power meter. The needle rose and flickered just below the line dividing red from orange. The buggy wouldn’t last much longer. Deep-cell batteries tend to deliver a steady charge up to the point they are virtually depleted. The vehicle would slip right along until the very end and then die with little warning.
According to the clock, I should have been close. I’d been traveling for three and a half hours. All together, I’d spent maybe an hour inspecting the two campsites. That left about two and a half hours of drive time. With no way to accurately measure speed, the estimate had nothing going for it but guesswork. I could have covered twenty miles and be one small rise away from the southern point or still have several miles ahead of me.
On a map, the coastline looked straight. In reality, it bobbed and weaved in gentle curves, compliments of the swirling currents just offshore. In some places, the sand dropped sharply into water that looked several feet deep. In others, the beach spread out wide and flat. In between the two, shallow bays had been gouged out of the side of the island. The same currents piled sand up in some spots and pulled it back out to sea in others leaving a coastline that rose and fell as much as it swerved back and forth.
I stopped because I was getting close, because I didn’t want to suddenly top a rise and see a couple of fishermen standing just ahead. This meeting didn’t need to start out with everyone tense and on edge. I wanted no one startled, especially me. I’d seen too many weird things in the past couple of days to simply go traipsing into a group of people without first trying to make sure they really were people, not look-alikes who were busy growing little arms out of their sides. I wanted to see them first and wanted a damned good field of view when I did.
The windmill whirred as I walked toward the next point. At least one part of the coming storm might end up as a plus. Higher winds meant the batteries would charge faster. Nothing but more coastline greeted me at the top of the rise. The sight of tan beach beset by angry waves tossing whitecaps toward the shore drifted off in the distance. I sighed and started back, wondering where my math had failed.
My phone beeped as I walked by the passenger’s seat. I reached in, picked it up, and looked at the notification on the screen. The text sitting on the display had come from Elsie’s phone.
“Drama at the station,” it read.
I stared at the single line, both wanting to know what she meant and dreading the answer. Her choice of words lent no sense of danger to the message, but one of tensions and high passions. With Denise still fresh in my mind, the immediate thought went to Joshua.
I sighed and clicked the reply button. In this day of texts and tweets, blogospheres and online communities, I fully admit to being both clueless and handicapped. I’d grown up in an age when people talked on phones rather than used them to talk, type, surf, and update their status. Both Jayne and Becky had taken issue with my fumbling approach to cell phones. Becky had been irritated when I failed to respond to a text or couldn’t figure out how to take a picture. Jayne had been amused.
Consequently, I kept the message short and typed a single question mark in the reply box.
The phone dinged almost immediately, an action that left me rolling my eyes. Elsie might be an old woman, but she had taken to the new world order as fast as the rest. The message that came back left me wincing.
“Moses knows.”
I flung the phone back into the dune buggy. A jealous lover back at the station was all I needed after a morning of hanging around mutilated corpses.
“Wonderful,” I said out loud as I slid back into the driver’s seat.
Half an hour later, a single pickup parked on the sand a half mile ahead appeared. Off to the right, the top of a cabin rose above the dunes. I had to be close. Just up from the southern point, the Park Service operated half a dozen or so small cabins dedicated to the fishermen who frequented the island. All of them sat high on pilings in a testament to the storms that often sent flood waters washing over the island. If memory served me right, most looked to be about the size of an average garage. I’d never stayed in one, but knew they had electricity. I’d seen the lights pouring from the windows on the trip with my father. Beyond that, I knew little about the layout or the contents.
I pulled up near a cutout where a sandy road led out from the cabins to the beach wondering whether I should head for the pickup or go directly into the camp. I ended up not ha
ving to make that decision. Three men appeared over the dunes before I could gather my things from the buggy.
One carried a tire iron, holding it like a club. Another held a baseball bat. The man in the middle appeared to be unarmed. All three looked serious and determined.
“Well
, hell,” I said out loud and wondered just how many more shitty episodes my day had left in it.
Chapter XIX - Points South
Fifty feet away, they spread apart, the two men on either end fanning out in a flanking maneuver. I sighed and turned back to the dune buggy. The revolver lay in the passenger’s seat atop the jacket I’d taken off earlier. The shotgun I’d taken from the Wall Street camp lay next to it, the barrel poking out the side of the little vehicle. The backpack that held my food and water sat in the floor.
I leaned in and picked up the backpack, trying to act as normal as possible. Pulling the pack free, I slung it over my shoulder and slid out the shotgun casually as if I carried it with me everywhere I went. I made sure to keep the barrel pointed toward the sand.
The sight of the weapon brought them up short. Turning to face them, I forced a smile on my face.
The man in the middle held out his hands, palms up. “Easy there, Mister. We’re just being careful. In case you haven’t heard, there’s a travel ban in effect.”
The words came out with a strong northeast accent. He seemed not to like the letter “R” in the way that people in Boston paaked their caahs. Becky and I had spent five of our tempest-strewn years living in Massachusetts. If I had to place him, it would have been north of a line running through Quincy.
“Hold up, Roger. You too, Sam.”
The men on either side came to a stop. Neither looked happy. I couldn’t tell if they were upset that I had a gun or that they wouldn’t get to beat me senseless any time soon. The one on the left stood close to six feet tall. He was neither thin nor heavy, but thick like a tree trunk. He wore sneakers, cut off jeans, a tank top, and a do rag. A tattoo high on the right side of his chest poked out at the point where a sleeve should have been. I needed to get closer to make sure, but it looked like a rebel flag. The one on the right was a couple of inches shorter and carried a beer belly big enough that the black Megadeath T-shirt he wore hung open at the bottom like a skirt. He had donned cutoffs like the other man. Instead of sneakers, he had waddled through the sand in brown flip-flops.
I turned my attention to the man in the middle. He had sandy brown hair and a stocky build.
“I can understand being cautious,” I told him. “I’m with a group of people staying at the old village of Portsmouth on the northern end of the island. I thought I would come down and say hello.”
The man eyed the dune buggy.
“What is that thing?”
I grinned. The little vehicle was an ice breaker for sure. Nothing else like it existed anywhere on the planet.
“My Dad had a golf cart, a lawn mower, and a blow torch. One of his neighbors dubbed it his vehicular Frankenstein,” I said and eyed Do-Rag. The man stared back with hard black eyes.
“I heard him curse a lot, and saw a lot of electricity arcing around in the garage,” I said when I turned back to the man in the middle “I never heard him yell, ‘It’s Alive!’ though.”
Amusement crinkled at the corners of the man’s eyes. “I see. What’s the little propeller on the top for?”
“Why, that’s what pushes it along. You know, like an air boat.”
He looked at the windmill incredulously. “You’re kidding, right?”
I laughed. “Yeah, I’m kidding. That’s a windmill. It charges the batteries.”
He scratched at his head. “I have to tell you. I’ve seen a lot of strange things in the past couple of weeks. This is the first one that didn’t make me want to kill it.”
“I know what you mean,” I said in agreement. “That’s another reason I’m here. I don’t like being blindsided. We all have cell phones up there. If you folks stay here, I’d like to exchange numbers with you.”
He looked confused. I didn’t blame him. Walking up to a group of strangers and offering your number would have generated cautious looks before The Fever.
“We’re on the same island. Either one of us needs help, we got no where else to turn.” I said. “Not only that, but I’m guessing that if a food drop occurs, it’ll be here or at Portsmouth. We don’t have a problem calling you up and telling you to come get some.”
He studied the dune buggy.
“What’s your name, bud?”
“William Hill.”
The man leaned over and spat. “The William Hill, huh? Well, how about that? I’m Ryan Parks. Hate to tell you, but we’re not accepting visitors.”
At the corner of my vision, Megadeath was still edging off to my right while trying to look as nonchalant as possible.
“How many people do you have here?”
Parks canted his head to one side. “Seven, why?”
I lifted a shoulder indifferently. “I was just wondering how big the funeral would be.”
He frowned at me. “What funeral?”
“The one you’ll be holding for Roger if he keeps trying to move around behind me. I’ve never been a patient man. I’m guessing he has about two steps worth of living left if he keeps moving that way.”
Parks seemed unfazed. “As you can tell, he’s not real bright. I keep waiting for the ghouls to eat on his corpse. I don’t know if it’s dumb luck or the fact that he smells so bad that keeps him alive.”
He swung his gaze in the man’s direction.
“Go ahead. I’d like to see what that gun will do,” he said deliberately.
I shifted slightly in order keep all three men in my vision. If Megadeath took another step or two, I’d have to switch back and forth between them. I let the gun barrel drift in his direction.
He looked nervously back to the other two.
“If you keep walking, you’ll be the second person I’ve killed this week. Understand?”
His eyes darted between me and Parks. Finally, he nodded.
“He seems smart enough to me,” I said to Parks. “Why did you call me the William Hill?"
The man’s smile had no humor in it. He jerked his head toward the mainland.
“You’re popular with our warden. He’s a big man, runs around in a police launch. The day after the ban went into effect, a couple of boys who’d come across in a boat decided to make a run for home.”
He paused and spat again. “They lived forty minutes away. Your friend blew them out of the water. One of the bullets hit the gas tank. They flopped around out there for a while.”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
A sly look slid across his face. “Figure of speech. He’s on the lookout for you. I think he might have a bullet or two with your name on it.”
He looked back toward the cabins. “I bet he’d be happy if someone told him you were here.”
I couldn’t help but follow his gaze.
“He’s here?”
Parks shook his head. “We could all be infected, you know. He just runs by in his little blue-light boat waving his gun. He pulled up about thirty feet off the dock the first day and gave us a lecture. Most of it was about us not trying to go anywhere, but the last part, it was all about you.”
He raised one eyebrow. “I don’t know what you done to piss him off, but he might find him a gas mask and one of them germ suits to come over here for you.”
Do-Rag turned and walked off. “If you’re going to gab all day, you don’t need me,” he said as he passed. “I’m going to go check the snares.”
Parks looked over at Megadeath. “Go with him, Roger.”
I wanted to go myself, not with any of them, but back north. Only I couldn’t. The dune buggy wouldn’t make it a mile. The plan to spend the night in one of the cabins didn’t look good either. They weren’t offering. Even if they did, I might have been safer sleeping in the tent at the Wall Street camp.
His actions made no sense. Joining forces in a world falling apart made sense. Combining skills, talents, and numbers offered better odds and presented a stronger front to the enemy. I had no idea who the enemy was, but I was damned sure we had one. Sitting miles apart left both camps in a weaker position and left us much more open to being picked off one by one.
Parks squatted on the sand, his knees wide apart.
“How many people do you have up there?”
I felt like asking him if his grade school had skipped the letter “R”. There came out sounding like theah.
“More than seven,” I said with a tight smile. Overhead, the sun finally surrendered to the clouds. The windmill whirred beside me in the rising wind. Behind me, the surf pounded against the beach. All the signs pointed to wet weather moving in.
His gaze shifted to the shotgun.
“That’s a nice weapon you have there, a high-dollar tactical model. I don’t know how good it would be for hunting, but it sure could clear out a room.”
I hefted the gun, trying to decide whether or not to tell him where I’d gotten it.
“Yeah, it could,” I said finally, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. “Why in the hell are we sitting here in the sand staring at each other? Are you guys so well off that you don’t need any help?”