Frustration swept through me. “You’re living in beach cabins smaller than a two-car garage. You came across those dunes looking for a fight, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is wrong with you people?”
His face tightened.
“Maybe I should ask you the same thing. You come traipsing twenty miles down a beach in the middle of a travel ban expecting what?“
He looked at me as if expecting me to answer. “You try that anywhere else in the country and someone will put a bullet in you. The world wasn’t a real friendly place before The Fever. People can’t afford to be now. For all I know you could be infecting me right now.”
“Bullshit,” I said flatly. “When people are worried about getting sick, the last thing they do is start circling someone who might be infected like a pack of wolves.”
His gaze fell to the shotgun and lingered. I couldn’t remember seeing such a look of raw hunger on anyone’s face before. Parks wanted the gun in the worst way.
“We have to protect ourselves and what we have. We’ve been expecting backpackers and campers to come straggling out of the woods looking for handouts.”
I stared at him. “What do you have that’s so damned important?”
“We got water. We got power. We got food from the ocean. We have shelter,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone. “And no one here is sick. The world is a different place now. People have to hold on to what they got. This show isn’t over, not by a long shot. The Fever is going to cleanse the earth.”
I’d had about as much of Ryan Parks as I could tolerate, at least for one day.
“Whatever,” I said. “How many letters are in the alphabet?”
He sat back, startled by the question.
“Come again?”
I gave him my own version of a mirthless grin.
“Just wondering if your grade school fucked up logic in the same way they fucked up teaching you how to talk. Then again, I’m not surprised that a man who can’t enunciate the letter “R” also can’t keep up with his reasons for being an asshole,” I said, venting the frustration that had been building. “Ten seconds ago, you were worried that I might be infecting you. Now, your reason for coming over the dunes like a bunch of union-busters has changed to protecting your territory.”
Anger swelled on his face.
“Want some advice?” I asked and then gave it before he had a chance to speak. “Don’t come up with another crappy excuse. It’ll just make you look even less capable of staying on topic and more intent on rationalizing greed and stupidity.”
The look on his face left me wondering if I might end up using the shotgun on him instead of Megadeath.
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll leave.”
I didn’t like the idea of giving up, but arguing with him would get me nowhere. With The Fever destined to kill millions, if not billions, I could see the same scenario playing out in communities around the world. Fear of infection was a valid point. Not as he had approached it here, though. The three of them had come looking for trouble.
Parks had confirmed the cabins still had power. That situation wouldn’t last. At the first sign of trouble on the power grid, a five-mile cable to a deserted island would be the first connection shut off and the last one repaired. Power would be nice, but we could make do without it and, in the process, perhaps make ourselves more ready for winter.
Half the reason for the trip had been to check out the south end to see if it might be more hospitable. We could move twenty miles if we had to or if the southern end offered better survival options. Looking at Parks, it seemed the first thing we’d end up doing was fighting the contingent at this end.
For the first time, I realized how truly alone we were. No one wanted us, not Ocracoke, not the mainland, not even people on our own damned island.
“How do you feel about swapping phone numbers in case there’s a food drop?”
He nodded. “Well now, that sounds fine. We don’t mind coming up to get supplies.”
My dad used to say that what people didn’t say often told more than what they did say. Parks didn’t mind coming to the north end if I called him to let him know supplies were waiting. He also didn’t offer to return the favor.
I glanced down the beach, gaze roaming over the sand until I found a piece of driftwood. It looked old and gnarled where water and worms had worn deep grooves across its surface. Stepping around to the side of the dune buggy, I dug through the rear compartment, hoping to find a pen or at least the stub of a pencil. I came up with a rusty nail.
I walked across to the two-foot section of wood, bent down and scratched my phone number across the gray surface. The hard steel dug through the weathered layer on top to expose lighter wood underneath. By the time I was done, the numbers were clear and easy to read. Parks had followed me, settling back on his haunches twenty feet away.
I stuck the nail in my pocket and pointed at the numbers I’d just etched into the wood. “That’s my number. Call me so I’ll have yours. Any weird shit goes on down here, get any food deliveries, call me. I’ll do the same for you. We’re too far apart to come running to help, but it would be nice to be warned. Deal?”
He looked at the number and nodded. “Deal.”
I looked back up to the pickup I’d noticed earlier. The tide had started in. I was surprised to see water rushing up to the tires. “Whose truck is that?” I asked, motioning toward the vehicle.
Parks stared at me, his eyes unreadable. “I don’t know. It was there when we got here.”
The batteries on the dune buggy had been nearly dead when I pulled up earlier. I’d been talking for less than thirty minutes. The little windmill needed more time to do its job.
“It’s not yours?”
He shook his head. “No. Like I said, it was there when we got here.”
“Mind if I check it out?”
“Go ahead. You’re wasting your time though. We already siphoned the gas from the tank and took all the good stuff out of it.”
I shouldered the shotgun and started down the beach, leaving the dune buggy to charge. A week ago, the tide wouldn’t have been as far advanced up the beach. The difference between tide markers lay in the moon. The highest tides occur during the full and new moons, when the sun and the moon line up to produce a stronger gravitational force. Quarter phases of the moon bring the lowest change between high and low tide since the same gravitational forces tend to cancel each other. Who ever had left the truck had probably left it far enough back on the sand at the time. With the full moon approaching soon, the vehicle could end up half-submerged.
“When you leaving?” Parks asked.
I glanced back at him. “Soon.”
He waved back toward the sound. “Then I’m going back. I’ll be watching though. Don’t try to come near the cabins.”
I ignored him and kept walking.
The truck couldn’t have been there more than a couple of weeks. The Park Service would have hauled it away if it had been left on the beach before the travel ban went into effect. If Parks was telling the truth, maybe the owner had bummed a boat ride back when he realized the ferry wasn’t coming to get him. Maybe he’d run into whatever had destroyed the Wall Street camp. Maybe, maybe, maybe—I had lots of questions and no answers.
At that point, the only answer I cared about was the battery. If Parks had ransacked the vehicle, I was willing to bet he’d left the battery. Removing it required work. Pulling out coolers and siphoning gas were much easier tasks and had an immediate impact. With power supplied to the cabins, he would have no need for the battery.
I did. Aside from putting it to use at the station, the battery in the truck might just have enough juice in it to help me get back.
The driver’s side window had been smashed in. I tried the door handle. It opened easily. I leaned in, and felt along under the dash until I found the hood latch. Wading around to the front in water midway up my calves, I pulled the hood up, peeked inside and grinned. The battery hadn’t been t
ouched. It sat as secure in its cradle as it had the day the truck had been left on the beach. The immediate question then became, how was I going to get it out? Not only did I need to remove the bolt fastening the battery in place, I also wanted the cables that snaked off toward the starter and the engine block.
Leaving the hood open, I trudged back down the beach to the dune buggy. Dad had packed the rear compartment full of items he had deemed useful. I fished out emergency rain gear in the form of a plastic poncho, a compass, a knife with what looked like a glow-in-the-dark handle, and a sealed Tupperware sandwich box full of screws and electrical connectors. At the bottom lay the three tools he said could fix about anything—a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and a hammer.
“If you can’t get it off with the pliers or screwdriver,” he’d said the first time I’d seen the little assortment, “take the hammer and beat the hell out of it. At least you’ll feel better.”
I snatched up the pliers and hurried back to the truck. Removing the cables proved to be the easy part. The bolt locking the carriage in place turned out to be incredibly long, rusty, and nearly impossible to get to with the pliers. I almost gave up and went back for the hammer. When it finally came free, I lugged both battery and cables up onto the sand away from the water.
Then I went back. Another idea had blossomed while I’d been removing the battery and looked down to realize my hand sat atop the truck’s alternator. If you want an automotive counterpart to the dune buggy’s windmill, it is a vehicle’s alternator. That one piece of equipment is what keeps a battery alive. I wasn’t sure how we’d use it, but I brought the alternator and the fan belt that drove it back to the beach with the rest of my treasures.
The job left me sweaty and greasy. I squatted in the sand and studied the truck, wondering what else I could take with me that might prove useful. Parks said they’d stripped the vehicle. The bed had been cleaned out for sure. In fact, it seemed too clean. A fisherman would have had the back packed full of coolers, rods and reels, tackle boxes, camp chairs. The list of potential items seemed endless and ranked high on the list of “good stuff.” Trash didn’t. Yet, the truck bed was clean of empty lure containers and discarded sandwich bags as well. Parks had taken everything.
Why?
The question joined the other dozen for which I had no answers. I rose and walked back over to the driver side door and peered inside. The interior looked as clean as the bed. I opened the door and slid inside the driver’s seat trying to get an impression of the man who had owned the vehicle. Gray streaks on the liner at the edge of the window identified him as a smoker. The man had evidently eaten in the cab often. Dark splotches across the seat covers marked out grease and ketchup stains. Yet, the ashtray was clean and no ashes or food wrappers littered the floorboard.
I leaned over and opened an empty glove box. The sun visors had no papers tucked behind them. The only thing I could find in the molded compartment halfway down the door were two wooden matches and a few pennies.
Where was the registration slip? The insurance cards?
After a few minutes of fruitless searching, I stepped out and pulled the back of the bench seat over toward the steering wheel. The space behind it looked as clean as the rest of the vehicle.
Curious, almost desperate to find something, I leaned in and ran my hand under the seat. Several loose items slid under my hand. I raked them backward toward the opening. A hash pipe slid out. I blinked and stared at it. The slender piece of glass with a bowl at one end was the last thing I’d expected to find. I dug under the seat again and found what felt like a pair of cards. I scooped them backward.
Two pictures slid out. The first depicted a sunset over water. The second had a man and woman standing in front of the truck, arms linked around each other. I stared at it, breath stuck in my throat. I’d found Jim and Brittney.
I thought about the way Parks and the other two had come out on the beach. The truck hadn’t been stripped. It had been cleaned to remove any trace of the owners. Parks had lied. I didn’t know if he’d killed the two, but he damned sure knew more than he’d told me.
I jerked upright and shot a glance behind me. Far down the beach, rising like a statue over one of the dunes, Megadeath stood watching me.
The sight of him sent chills running down my arms. I stepped back and scratched my head as if confused and then made a show of throwing up my arms in defeat. Without looking at him, I gathered up the items I’d taken from the truck and lugged them back to the dune buggy.
The battery went on the cooler rack. The rest I threw in the floor under the passenger’s seat. When I stood up to brush off my hands, I glanced back toward the dunes. Megadeath hadn’t moved, his blocky figure looking more like a statue garbed in black than a person. I left him standing there when I drove off. Even a quarter of a mile down the beach, his dark form still rose above the white sand.
A mile later, I cut the power at the top of a small rise where I’d be able to see anyone approaching, The only chance I had in making the trip back to the station lay in that extra battery. Even then, I wasn’t sure it would make much difference. The battery types were different. I didn’t know if the different designs would clash or even if the truck battery had any power at all. The only way to answer both of those questions was to hook it up to the vehicle’s power plant.
I thumbed the switch on the little meter to get a reference point before I started and watched the needle hover depressingly in the middle of the danger zone.
Replacing one of the worn out batteries with the new one took less than five minutes. A new test on the meter switch brightened my day considerably. The needle rose to the edge of the green. That wouldn’t get me home, but left plenty of time to finish the journey on foot before night fell. On even brighter notes, the farther I went, the less of a chore it would be to fetch the little vehicle tomorrow. Plus, every mile put more distance between it and Parks. With half the island under Morehead City’s jurisdiction, I wouldn’t have put it past the man to claim it as his own if he found it below the dividing line.
With the exhausted battery strapped on the back, I slid back into the dune buggy and resumed my northward trek. The bad weather that had been threatening all morning finally came, first in a wispy spray that felt invigorating rather than uncomfortable. Within minutes, the skies turned darker and rain fell in a steady tick-tock against the canvas top. Even cold water dripping down around me and rain blowing in from the passenger’s side couldn’t dampen the good mood that the new battery had provided. I donned the jacket I’d brought, dug out the little poncho from the rear compartment, and huddled down inside the dune buggy as best I could. Somewhere along the way, I lit a smoke and thought about the water trickling down into the cistern at the station. Life seemed good, if a bit chilly.
It’s funny how things work out. Had the new battery been D.O.A., I might have opted to build a shelter and wait out the charging process. I might have stayed south and not made it back to the Wall Street camp that evening. Had I not been so elated at the sudden burst of power, I might have realized that everyone had been making assumptions that had no basis in fact, just in feeling.
I might have done those things. In fact, I should have. It wasn’t like I had zero reasons to think otherwise. I’d seen a monster crawl out Zachary’s body. I’d watched a woman turn from a frail wife into a hissing fiend bristling with inhuman strength and a taste for human flesh.
I already knew that death no longer held the same finality it had before The Fever. All of our fears had been centered on the night. I don’t know if that assumption had been crafted in a collective sense from times when men clad in furs huddle around fires and listened as hungry beasts prowled the night or rooted in the simple reality that darkness robbed us of the one sense we used most.
Either way, we were wrong. Night carried its share of dangers. The biggest threat, however, had nothing to do with the passage of the sun, but in a body of knowledge passed down generation after generation that insist
ed we put childhood fears behind us, that snickered at the thought of monsters, and that taught us the dead were dead and would forever remain so. The world had changed suddenly and without warning.
It had evolved.
We hadn’t.
Chapter XX - The Day of the Dead
The power meter lied. With the needle sitting just under the green swath that spelled out safety, I should have had at least two hours of run time. I didn’t. The dune buggy started slowing down forty-five minutes after I’d changed out the batteries. I cut the power the moment I noticed the change in speed. A regular battery might limp along providing reduced amounts of power for a while. The type Dad had used wouldn’t. The little vehicle had no more than a few minutes of run time left.
With heavy clouds still spitting rain overhead, I couldn’t see where the sun lay in relation to the horizon, but my cell phone told me I had a little over two hours to make an estimated twelve to fourteen miles. To a runner, that distance might have seemed trivial. Then again, I doubted many runners took off carrying weapons and water while having to watch the tree line for beasts that either ate their insides or bit off their heads.
Still, I could do it or at least come close if I busted my ass. I wouldn’t make the station by dark, but I wouldn’t be trudging in late either. Conscious of the time, I pulled the vehicle as far away from the water as I could without killing the batteries completely. Once I was sure I had it well above the high tide mark, I shut it down and started gathering up the things I’d take with me.
The pistol went in the pocket of my jacket. I slung the backpack over one shoulder and balanced the shotgun on the other. I’d have left the backpack if it hadn’t been for the water bottles inside. I once went twenty-two days without eating on a personal dare and knew I could do without food. I couldn’t say the same for water. A couple of thirsty hours would leave me like the batteries, slowing down and running out of juice.
The Island - Part 4 Page 7