I thought about dragging some brush out of the trees to camouflage the buggy in case Parks & Co. had decided to follow me. But, no amount of brush would cover the tire tracks that trailed off in the distance. With a sigh, I hit the beach and headed north, staying as close to the edge of the water as possible in order to take advantage of the harder sand. I felt good. The cloud cover and drizzle kept the heat down. I’d spent most of the day sitting on my rear while the dune buggy did all the work, so I had energy to spare. I knew I’d be late coming in, but also knew that if I kept a good pace the time exposed on the beach at night would be minimal.
If one thought gave me pause, it was passing the Wall Street camp on foot. The dune buggy might not go much faster than a brisk walk, but faster beat slower any day of the week near that place.
After blowing hard for an hour, the wind had dropped to little more than a light breeze. The rain no longer came in at a slant, but fell straight down, the drops light and cool. Any other time, I might have enjoyed the walk. The beach lay empty ahead of me for miles with nothing in sight but breaking waves tossing white water high up on the sand. The blue-green ocean that had surged bright and clear the past few days had turned as gray and restless as the clouds. The few birds that had not taken shelter rode the updrafts near the shoreline, searching for bait fish just beyond the line of breakers and looking like kites pinned to the sky.
The scene, though gloomy and wet, held a type of sterile beauty that only came where man had not. The first human who ever walked that shore saw the same sights, heard the same sounds, and felt the same salt spray drifting in on the wind.
Despite the need to make time, I stopped long enough to figure out how to take a picture with my phone. I had no one to share it with and didn’t know if I’d ever take the time to look at it again. I just wanted a piece of that ethereal vision of how the world should be that I could keep.
Mile after mile of lonely, windswept beach fell beneath my feet. When I turned and looked back, my trail wandered with the water, rising higher on the sand at times, drifting down toward the beach at others. In places, the incoming tide had already erased the signs of my passage as surely as if I’d never been there. After a while, it all looked the same. I had no idea how far I’d come or how far I had left to go. As much as I hated the thought, I needed to see the Wall Street camp. At least then, I’d know.
Two hours passed and still the beach looked empty. I knew I hadn’t passed the camp because I had yet to reach the wreck lying half buried in the sand. Time burned away. Whenever I glanced at the readout on the cell phone expecting to see a minute or two gone, five or ten had slipped away. With every glance at the clock, the sense of anxiety ratcheted up another notch. The little digital numbers had turned into an obsession. The physics major in me had my brain working overtime, assigning points on the beach to minute marks on the clock as a way of gauging my speed. If I could reach the Bauer camp by five o’clock, I knew I could make the station shortly after sunset.
I passed the five p.m. mark, and still saw no sign of the camp. At five-fifteen, I’d gone past anxious and reached the point of worry. I knew if I didn’t find it soon, I’d be out much later than I wanted to be. At five-twenty, the phone jangled into life. I fished it from my pocket and looked to see who was on the other end. The number looked familiar, yet distant, like a friend who hadn’t called in years. The call came close to going to voicemail before I realized the number belonged to Jayne.
I pressed the talk button and brought the phone to my ear.
“Hey.”
“Hello, William.”
Strained silence followed. I tried to keep from panting into the phone and still make time.
“Hello, Jayne.”
“How’s the beach?”
“Not exactly what I expected.”
“You sound out of breath.”
“It’s a long story,” I told her, and then stretched the truth a bit. “I got caught out on the beach in a storm. I’m trying to make it back to Angel before dark. You okay?”
She didn’t answer for a long time.
“I called to tell you that Becky died last night.”
The need for speed evaporated. I stopped and stared up at the clouds.
“What? How?”
Jayne’s voice came back, soft and distant.
“She’d gone to New York a couple of weeks ago to a conference. She had The Fever. They think she contracted it there.”
She hesitated.
“She started coughing three days ago. By dinner, she had a fever of a hundred and three. She lived two days once the symptoms appeared.”
I struggled for words and couldn’t find any.
“William, are you still there?”
“Yeah,” I said finally.
“I thought you’d want to know. She was the last person you could really call family or at least ex-family.”
“How did you find out?”
She sighed across the line. “She was all over the news. The first case, you know.”
I’d come to Portsmouth expecting to die. Somehow, in that little fatalistic fantasy world, everyone else that I’d ever known or cared about sailed through without a scratch. I hadn’t seen Becky in more than a year. The news still hit me harder than I would have thought. All the years together followed by all the years learning to be apart and still some of the same old emotions came flooding back. I wanted to tell Jayne that I appreciated her calling, but even the thought of the words sounded hollow and distant. I went for another tack, not sure how one was supposed to deal with emotions surrounding the death of an ex-wife with an ex-girlfriend.
“Anyone else sick?”
“Not yet,” she said. “Becky was a nurse. Unlike most of us, she could still travel. No one knows yet if it spread.”
I felt numb and looking down, realized I was standing still. “Jayne, can I call you back later tonight? I’d like to talk to you, but things here are a little strange right now. I need to get back before dark.”
“Yes, call me. I’ll be up.”
I told her goodbye and started to hang up when I heard her call my name again.
“Yes?”
Her voice had an oddly detached tone to it.
“Take care of yourself, William.”
“I will, Jayne. I’ll call you later. I promise.”
I did hang up then. I also started walking. As much as the news left my mind reeling, I had to make as much use of the remaining daylight as possible.
At five forty, with less than an hour of daylight left, I spotted the tent flapping listlessly in the light air. My best guess had me making six miles in an hour and a half, or roughly four miles an hour. Knowing I had at least six more to go meant it would be full on dark by the time I reached the station. The clouds didn’t help either. On a sunny day, the beach would have still been bright. With the heavy overcast, it already looked dim and dark.
I pulled up beside the camp, breathing hard and knowing I wasn’t going to make it at the rate I’d been going. I had two options. I could trudge away and walk the last hour in the dark or drop everything I had been carrying and try to jog the rest of the way. I mean, honestly, I either had to move faster or accept the fact that I’d be exposed on the beach at night. When it came to moving faster, the only way to do that was to leave the only protection I had lying on the beach. The time for hopes and dreams had run face first into reality. I could keep the guns and face whatever the night threw at me or drop them and run. The last option made the most sense, except for the fact that I would be tired and defenseless if anything did come.
The choices, to put it mildly, sucked.
I stood in the dying light with sweat cooling on my body. The falling temperatures had helped more than they had hurt, keeping me from overheating during the walk up the beach. Every minute idle meant another minute later getting back. At the same time, I hated the paths laid out in front of me so intensely that mind and body balked at taking either. I’d just about settled on dr
opping the gear and running for it when the idea struck me so suddenly and forcefully it felt almost as if I’d been slapped. I turned abruptly, halfway through the motion of dropping the backpack and looked up at the Wall Street camp, past the tent and the card table to the white Suburban sitting motionless in shadows that had grown deeper and darker as the day progressed. I had a way to get home. I just needed the keys.
The surf boomed behind me as I stood looking at Eddie’s little camp of horrors. The new option had its own share of pros and cons. What if I couldn’t find the keys? If I dropped everything and jogged the rest of the way, I’d make the station around nightfall - assuming of course, that I ran into nothing big and hungry along the way. Even if I did find them, it meant poking around the grisly scene and possibly rifling through pockets. The idea of coming into the station with the big SUV had a lot of appeal. The thought of shuffling through a dead man’s possessions and handling his body didn’t.
The one thing I knew for certain was that I had little time to make a decision. What little light remained had grown weak and the shadows under the trees already looked as dark as most nights.
I hefted the backpack to my shoulder and checked the shotgun’s magazine to make sure it was loaded. I had no idea what type of round the weapon held. I wasn’t sure it mattered that much. A twelve-gauge could be horribly effective at short range. Double-ought buckshot carried nine pellets, each slightly larger than a .32 caliber pistol round. The pump slide allowed the gun to be reloaded in a couple of seconds without having to move the barrel far off-target. Add it all up and one man could lay a serious hurt on anything in front of him. People who practiced with the weapon could empty the magazine in less time than it took the average man to draw a breath and exhale. The effect could be devastating, roughly equivalent to taking forty-five rounds from Gabriel’s pistol.
None of which did you any good if the intended target leaned down from the treetops and bit your head off.
I gave myself ten minutes to find the keys. More than that and I’d be fumbling around in near darkness anyway with shadows closing in around me. If I couldn’t find them in that window, I’d drop everything and hit the beach running.
The plan offered one thing the earlier choices had lacked and that was hope. I looked down at the cell phone and pegged the time in my mind. When I looked back up at the dense shadows threatening to swallow the Suburban, the words that came to mind had nothing to do with hope. They revolved around every curse word I knew and some I invented on the spot.
Moving up the beach and away from the ocean, I walked slow and cautious, senses alert and testing the air for anything out of the ordinary. Nothing about the camp screamed danger other than the fact that I knew what lay inside. The tent still looked as if it had just been pulled from the store shelf. The plate with its bloody message still gleamed from the card table. The same pair of shoes that had been positioned outside the tent before the two had been killed still sat side by side as if placed there by an attentive butler.
A few steps closer and I could make out the bodies. Neither of them looked to have been disturbed. Details were sketchy. The shadows had grown so deep and the light so dim that the man looked like a white blur spread out over the ground and the woman appeared as little more than a dark shape suspended in the trees.
I moved closer, conscious of the fact that the world seemed to have grown abruptly still and quiet. My breath came loud and hoarse. Sweat broke out across my entire body. Tiny rivulets trickled down my face, more sweltered in my armpits, and a virtual stream slid down the middle of my back. I could feel my own heat rising around my face even as every hair on my body tried to stand erect. The scene felt intensely electric, the way clothes feel after you scrub your feet across the carpet. Even the air clung to my face.
Ahead, like a line drawn in the sand, the shadows waited. As stupid as it sounds, the instant I stepped across into the darkness beneath the trees, if felt as if the temperature dropped twenty degrees. I stood trembling, body unable to decide whether or not it should keep sweating or start shivering.
I stopped just inside the line dividing day from night and gave my eyes a minute to adjust. A mosquito fluttered across my face. The breeze off the ocean slid across my neck like a cold, clammy hand. But, nothing else moved. I could have been standing in an exhibit at a wax museum with the scene dedicated to every slasher flick that had ever been filmed. If something waited, I knew it could see me. I had the beach and what little remained of the day behind me. I’d stand out like a target at a rifle range. Yet, I couldn’t force my feet to take another step. I felt like a rabbit frozen to the ground ten feet in front of the wolf that wanted to eat it, believing in the blind instinct that said, if you don’t move, it won’t see you.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something monstrous, something big and hungry sat right in front of me. I looked around the camp, taking in as much detail as I could, feeling like I was staring at forest while trying to find a tree and not recognizing that the two were one and the same. My senses screamed at me to run. Yet, my brain kept asking: From what?
Details emerged slow, drawing clearer lines on the scene in front of me. Things weren’t as picture-perfect as they’d seemed. Birds had been at the man’s body. Had it not been for the three-pronged footprints etched into the sand around him, the first thought in my mind would have been Zachary and the impish little horror that had crawled down his throat. Knowing what had been eating away at the body didn’t erase the gruesome reminder that death leveled the playing field for everything, even apex predators. In a week, the same flies he would have swatted away without a thought, would have laid enough eggs to leave him swarming with maggots. The same crows and seagulls he would have chased away, would be shitting out his remains in long white streaks across the beach.
Most of the feeding looked to have been done around the exposed area at his neck. Here and there, the hungrier or perhaps more enterprising scavengers had ripped holes through his shirt. Deep canyons had been gouged out of the flesh beneath. One finger looked to be missing entirely from a splayed-out hand.
The smell wafting up from his body went beyond ripe and bordered on putrid, though not as strong as I would have imagined. The cool air had helped in that regard, I supposed. Had the day been hot and sweltering, his body would have probably been swollen and bloated, and the air reeking with the odor of decay.
I looked up at the woman. The birds had been busy there too. Her eyes were gone. Deep, black pits filled the empty eye sockets. A long, stringy piece of something trailed out of her right eye. I couldn’t tell what it was and had no desire to look closer.
The dial on the phone had already clicked off five minutes. I had not even started my search and already half the allotted time was gone. Reaching out with the toe of my shoe, I nudged at the man’s torso. His flesh felt stiff and heavy.
We cease being human the instant we die. Every bodily process that keeps skin elastic and flesh malleable, slips away with the last breath. Temperatures begin to drop without the calorie-burning engine at our core churning away at whatever we ate last. Within a few hours acids in the muscles cause them to contract and stiffen with rigor mortis setting in somewhere between two and six hours after death. I knew the condition could last as long as two to three days and that outside temperature had a strong effect on both the time of onset and duration.
Staring down at the body, none of that helped. All it told me was he’d been dead for a while, but not too long. I didn’t need a nurse or a doctor to understand that much.
A glance down at the cell phone told me I needed to get moving. Seven minutes had passed and all I’d done was poke his corpse with my foot. I took a deep breath and tried to erase the horrific images surrounding me.
“What would you do with the keys, William?” I asked out loud, breathing the words more than speaking them. Two options leapt to the front. I’d have them in my pocket or I would have left them in the vehicle. In personal terms, the latter of those
two choices made the most sense. Out here, with no one around, with no worries about thieves, I’d toss them in the seat or put them in a holder of some type—like a center console or maybe even set them up on the dash.
The idea blossoming in my mind when I edged around him sat squarely upon the hope that I wouldn’t have to go through the grisly and degrading process of searching his body, that all I had to do was open the door and the key would be lying right there for me to take. I slipped between the back of the Suburban and the woman hanging in the tree, keeping the hard metal at my back and watching her black form twirl gently in the light air.
Time, time, time… the thought screamed through my mind, urging my faltering feet to move faster. But I couldn’t. Stepping into the shadows felt like slipping into a river of death, where the stench rising from the surface seethed with the scent of rot and decay. I could taste the ripe and humid odor wafting from the man’s body mixing with the musty smell of decomposing leaves and the stink of rotting vegetation. The simple act of breathing left me feeling as if I’d stuck my head into a tomb and sucked up the rancid air.
A mosquito buzzed in my ear. The light tickle of another landing on my arm had me scrubbing the shotgun barrel across my skin to chase it away.
The act reminded me just how strong habit ran in humans. Even with the horror-show at every turn and the creepy sensation that each step took me closer to needing a coffin of my own, I couldn’t stand the thought of the insect sticking her needle-like snout into me. I knew it was a “her” too. Only the female of the species fed on blood.
The driver’s door opened easily when I tried the handle. Yellow light spilled over the interior. The outside of the Suburban projected a sense of power and intimidation. The inside breathed luxury with its soft, tan leather seats and dash that looked like the cockpit of an airplane. Like the camp, the interior of the vehicle was spotless, with everything tucked away perfectly in place. The seats were bare of both keys and any sort of trash. The glove box held an owner’s manual, an odd-looking key I knew could be used to lower the spare tire from under the rear end, and registration and insurance cards. The center console contained a checkbook, a small, pocket-sized road atlas, and a cell phone.
The Island - Part 4 Page 8