Blood Island

by Tim Waggoner

  Tamara had removed her phone from wherever on her nearly naked body she’d managed to conceal it and was checking texts and social media. Pete and Shari were talking in intense whispers – probably having another fight, Jarrod thought. Those two were always arguing. Tony looked bored, and Nina just kept smiling, as if she still couldn’t believe she was working on a real film – and on location, yet!

  Adorable, Jarrod thought.

  His cigarette was only halfway reduced to ash when Tasha said, “You were right.”

  Before Jarrod could ask what she meant, Inez, Boyd, and Saul stopped talking and they all looked toward Enrique. The man had both arms inside the mechanical pliosaur up to the elbows, almost as if he were a veterinary surgeon conducting an operation on a very exotic animal.

  “Well?” Inez called to him.

  Enrique looked at her and shook his head.

  “Fuck,” Inez muttered. She then turned to address the cast and crew. “That’s it for today. Damn it. Be back here at six a.m. sharp, and we’ll pick up where we left off.” She turned back toward Enrique and raised her voice. “Exactly where we left off, yes?”

  “Yeah,” Enrique muttered without turning to look at her. “Sure thing.”

  He didn’t sound all that sure to Jarrod, though. Evidently, he didn’t to Inez, either, for she glared at Enrique. But she didn’t say anything more to the man and returned to what was becoming a somewhat heated three-way conversation between herself, Saul, and Gordon.

  Jarrod took a last pull on his cigarette, then he removed it from his mouth, bent down, and put it out on the sand. He then put the butt in his pants pocket. He’d toss it in the trash when he got back to his hotel room.

  “I’ll be in Flotsam later if anyone would like to join me,” he announced.

  No one responded, but they didn’t need to. Jarrod knew they’d all show up at the bar sooner or later. There was nothing else to do in Bridgewater except drink, and Flotsam was the bar closest to the piece of shit hotel where they were all staying.

  As cast and crew began trudging up the beach, Jarrod turned to look at Tasha. She was standing at the edge of the water, staring out across the ocean. He walked over to stand next to her. He looked at the water as well, but he didn’t see anything special. A couple of watercraft, some seagulls, but that was about it.

  “Something bothering you?” Jarrod asked.

  He liked Tasha quite a bit. Not in a sexual way, of course. He was old enough to be her grandfather, for god’s sake. Besides, he was gay, although as it had been some years since his last serious relationship, he was beginning to think he qualified as asexual these days. He liked Tasha because she exuded a youthful energy he found refreshing, along with a complete absence of the cynicism that seemed to eventually affect everyone in this business. And she had the uncanny ability to anticipate his needs and was ready to take care of them before he could ask. That quality was a bit spooky at times, but it only added to her charm as far as he was concerned.

  For a moment, Tasha didn’t respond to Jarrod’s question, but then she blinked several times and gave her head a small shake, as if to clear it.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said, giving him a smile. “Just thinking.”

  Jarrod returned the smile and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “My dear, if you hope to make any kind of life for yourself in this business, thinking is the last thing you should do.”

  * * * * *

  The Mass lay a half mile off shore, submerged to a depth of twenty feet. When the sun grew too warm and the Mass’ surface started to dry out, it descended into the ocean to cool itself and rehydrate, which is what it had done now. It rested during these times, for its system – while primitive in many ways – was staggeringly complex, and it needed time to recalibrate the intricate neural network linking its trillions and trillions of cells. The creatures that served as its Hunters could not remain motionless, however. If they ceased swimming, no water would flow through their gills and they would not be able to extract any oxygen from it, and thus they would die. So while the Mass rested, its Hunters – which currently numbered an even three dozen – swam in slow, lazy circles, and unless food was foolish enough to come too close to their jaws during this time, they left it alone.

  These Hunters were far more efficient than the first small ones it had taken so very long ago, when it too had been much smaller. They were swift and strong, perfectly designed to hunt and kill in their environment, and they served the Mass well. The Mass had to absorb them and find new ones every few years. Once they joined the Mass, they were unable to procreate, so the Mass couldn’t simply breed more servants. But that was no matter. There were always more potential Hunters in the oceans of the word for the Mass to choose from.

  The Mass was not self-aware, not in a way any human scientist would recognize, but it did possess a certain kind of intelligence. And as it floated in the ocean’s calm silence, it felt something strange, something it had never felt before.

  It felt an Other.

  A mind, separate from itself. Smaller than its neural network, but strong. It was located not in the water, but on what the Mass thought of – inasmuch as it thought at all – as the Dry Which Does Not Move. The Mass was vaguely aware that there was food on the Dry. From time to time over the millennia, its Hunters had snatched morsels from the Dry’s edge or from the shallow waters close to the Dry. But there was so much more sustenance in the ocean that it rarely bothered going near the Dry. If it happened to drift close to shore, fine, but it didn’t seek it out. As tasty as the food on the shore was, it wasn’t worth the effort to go in search of it.

  But this Other . . . There was something about its presence that called to the Mass, that pulled like the great tidal forces that moved the vast oceans themselves. The Other wasn’t exactly like the Mass, but it was similar in many ways.

  The Mass was intrigued.

  The Mass wanted to investigate.

  The Mass roused itself and floated to the surface. A moment later it began to drift slowly toward the Dry. Its Hunters, also awake now, swam forward, stretching their umbilicals as far as they would go, eager to see what they might find for their master.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The first thing Tamara did when she got back to her hotel room was take a shower. While she hadn’t gone into the water today, she’d spent most of her time on the beach, shooting scenes or – far more often – waiting to shoot, and the saltwater air was murder on her hair. The Sea Breeze hotel, where the cast and crew of the production, Inez included, were staying was without exaggeration, the shittiest place Tamara had ever stayed in. The shower stall was cramped, the water lukewarm, and the entire bathroom smelled musty. Her allergies were killing her, and she was so loaded up on meds that she felt muzzy-headed all the time.

  When she was finished, she dried herself and wrapped the towel around her head. She wished she had a joint to help her relax but carrying pot when you flew was such a hassle these days. She couldn’t wait until it was finally legalized in all fifty states. Normally when she was on location, she had no problem obtaining weed. There were always locals hanging around who would do anything to get her to drop her panties. But so far she’d had no luck. It was that goddamned hurricane. Janice? Janeen? Something like that. It had fucked up Bridgewater pretty good a couple years ago, and now the place was practically a ghost town. She’d originally auditioned for the role of Holly, the “intelligent but sexy grad student,” in this piece-of-crap movie because she thought it would get her some good publicity. Everyone was crazy about those dinosaurs that had eaten a bunch of people on that island, and Inez promised Devourer from the Deep would be the first movie based (however loosely) on that event.

  People will go apeshit for it! Inez had told her. We’ll be on the cover of every magazine in the world!

  Tamara had known Inez was bullshitting her about how strongly people would react to her crappy low-budget monster movie, but she’d been willing to gamble that the fi
lm would be able to ride the current dino craze and garner some decent attention. But since signing the contract, Tamara hadn’t been approached by a single reporter – not even a local one – for an interview. They’d only been in town shooting for several days, but she was already coming to regret landing this fucking role. She wanted to get through filming as fast as possible so she could go back to LA, buy some decent drugs, and start looking for another part. A better part. No more horror movies, though – and definitely no more working for Imagitopia Entertainment.

  Something else that hadn’t turned out the way she’d hoped was working with Jarrod Drayton. She’d seen a few of his films while growing up, and while she’d never been a huge fan, she’d enjoyed them well enough. But meeting Jarrod had been something of a disappointment. Oh, he was pleasant enough, but he had a sharp-edged wit that she wasn’t fond of – especially when the pointed end of that wit was directed at her. Plus, he was gay. She had nothing against gay people. After all, she identified as pansexual. But Jarrod was gay gay. She’d tried flirting with him, had even “accidentally” lost her bikini top when the two of them had been alone once. Jarrod’s eyes never dropped below the level of her chin. All he’d done was smile and say, I believe you’ve dropped something, love. So far in her career, she’d managed to fuck the lead actor in every film she’d had a part in, but now it looked like Jarrod was going to ruin her streak.

  Show business could really be a downer sometimes.

  She’d been sitting naked on her bed – except for the towel on her head, of course – for ten minutes or so when someone knocked at her door. She grinned, removed the towel from her head, gave her hair one last rub with it, then tossed it on the floor. She rose from the bed and padded barefoot over to the door. She’d could’ve peered through the peephole to see who was there, but what was the fun in that?

  She opened the door. Pete Dawson stood there, wearing a pair of baggy shorts and an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt. His gaze moved up and down her body, and when he got to her eyes, he smiled.

  Tamara cocked a hip.

  “Like what you see?” she asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  She stepped aside so Pete could enter, and once he was inside, she closed the door. The rooms opened directly to the outside, which meant it was possible someone might’ve seen him come in, but the risk turned Tamara on. Hell, if she thought she could convince Pete to go for it, she’d fuck him on the beach in broad daylight.

  She went into Pete’s arms and they kissed passionately. As they did, he worked her left breast with one hand and teased her clit with the other. She felt herself get instantly wet, and she began to relax. This is exactly what the doctor ordered, she thought. After a bit more, she pulled away and looked at him.

  “How long do we have?” she asked.

  “I told Shari that I was going back to the beach to talk to Enrique and see if the monster’s going to be safe to work with tomorrow. I can stay out half an hour, easy. Maybe a little longer.”

  “Speaking of longer . . .”

  Tamara slipped a hand inside Pete’s shorts and began to knead his burgeoning erection. He closed his eyes and moaned with pleasure. Maybe she shouldn’t be in such a hurry for this shoot to end. Not when she could find such pleasurable distractions as Pete.

  A couple minutes later they were both naked on the bed and fucking like a pair of rabid weasels.

  * * * * *

  Jarrod – whose birth name was the decidedly non-sinister Carl Holmberg – lay on the bed in his room, staring up at a crack in the ceiling. Despite his nominally being the star of this production, his hotel room was no nicer or larger than the rest of the cast and crew had. This did not bother him overmuch, though. Back in the glorious eighties he’d been a bonafide star – at least to those audience members who loved horror films. Brutus, the insane killer in The Ides of March series, was his most famous role, but he starred in a dozen other films, usually portraying the villain but sometimes, more rarely, the hero. Some of his fans viewed him almost as a dark god, and like any actor, he ate up all the attention and adoration, and he would’ve been happy to keep doing so the rest of his life. Back then, he would’ve thrown a truly epic tantrum if he’d been forced to stay in a shithole like this during a shoot.

  But the eighties hadn’t been all good. He’d watched too many of his friends – and several lovers – sicken and die from AIDs. And more than once he thought he’d become infected too, but he’d never tested positive. He hadn’t come out to the public at the time, although everyone in Hollywood knew he was gay. It wasn’t until the late nineties, long after the height of his fame – such as it was – had passed that he told a writer interviewing him for a horror movie magazine that he was gay. When the article was printed, the reaction from fans was a collective shrug, which quite pleased him. The world still had plenty of intolerance in it, but it had seemed there was a bit less now.

  He still had his fans, of course, and if they didn’t number as many as they had during his heyday, their devotion made up for it. He made regular appearances at horror movie conventions around the country and sometimes overseas. And he still worked, although the productions became more modest – to put it kindly – with low budgets and mediocre-to-terrible scripts. But he was being paid to act, if not a king’s ransom, and he was content with his lot.

  He’d had relationships over the years, the longest lasting almost a decade, but he’d never found that special person, the one with whom he could grow old. And now he never would.

  Leukemia was such an ugly word, but it was one he’d come to know extremely well over the last few years. Chemotherapy and radiation treatments had given him a short reprieve – nineteen months, to be precise – and then the disease had come raging back, worse than ever. The doctors had wanted him to go back into treatment immediately. They admitted his chances of going into remission again were slim, but slim was better than none, right?

  Jarrod didn’t see it that way. He’d be sixty-nine on his next birthday – assuming he lived long enough to reach it – and while that wasn’t considered particularly old these days, he felt he’d had a good run overall, and besides, a true performer knew to always leave the audience wanting more. He’d made peace with his impending death and was – in a morbid way – rather looking forward to it. He didn’t believe there was any life after this one, but who could say for certain until they crossed that final threshold?

  He could do without the symptoms, though. Joint pain, dizziness, fatigue, fever, and general weakness were the worst, but loss of appetite was the most annoying. If he was dying, he should be allowed to eat anything he wanted. All the delicious fatty and sugary foods that he’d denied himself over the years to stay trim. But he didn’t want to eat, had to practically force himself to nibble on something now and again. There truly is no justice in this world, he thought.

  The doctors – who’d been surprisingly understanding of his choice – had prescribed medicine to make him comfortable as his disease continued to devour him from within. They couldn’t say exactly how much time remained to him, but none of them expected him to live more than two more years, and that was the most optimistic estimate.

  So who gave a shit about a crappy hotel room? He was alive in this moment, and he intended to enjoy it as much as possible. And he’d do the same with the next moment, and the one after that, and he’d keep doing it until there were no more moments left. His choice had come with an unanticipated benefit, though. He no longer gave a damn. He still cared about things – his work, his colleagues – but he was no longer afraid of doing or saying the wrong thing. In the face of death, that sort of piddly-ass shit was meaningless. He found this attitude delightfully freeing. It was one of the reasons he’d taken up smoking, and who knew what else he might do before the Reaper came knocking at his door? The world was his cancer-ridden oyster, and he intended to take full advantage of it while he could.

  It was a shame that he’d had to start dying before he could truly live,
but as the young people said, YO-fucking-LO.

  He was grateful that the robo-dino had shit the bed this afternoon. He did his best to hide how tired he got these days from everyone, but even with drawing on his decades of experience lying for a living, he had a difficult time making it through a full day of filming without needing a rest. If he’d had a supporting role, he wouldn’t be needed on set as often, but no, he’d taken the lead role, hadn’t he? He might not be ego-driven as in his youth, but it seemed that even as he approached death, he still couldn’t quite manage to give up the spotlight.

  Vanity, thy name is actor.

  He’d continue to lie here for a while, an hour, maybe two, and then he’d rise, make himself presentable – as much as he could. He’d lost weight because of his illness, and he had a pallor that, while perfectly appropriate for a horror movie actor, looked decidedly unhealthy on a regular human being. And, as he had every night since coming to this town, he’d hit Flotsam – one of the few bars still open in Bridgewater – select a table and hold court until the bar closed or he became too weary to continue, whichever came first.

  He recalled something his grandmother, who’d continued working as a cleaning woman into her eighties, had once told him. It’s a good life if you don’t weaken.

  “Damn straight, Gran,” he said.

  * * * * *

  Tasha had the room next to Jarrod’s, ostensibly so she’d be close if he needed anything. But he never called on her after the day’s shooting was done. A dozen times each night she had to fight the urge to go knock on his door and ask if he needed anything. On the first day of shooting, when Inez had introduced her to Jarrod as his assistant, he’d said, I promise to do my absolute best not to work you to death when we’re filming, but when we’re not shooting, your time is your own. You’re too young to attend to an old relic like me night and day as if you were my personal servant. Go have fun. Take risks, make mistakes. Create some wonderfully embarrassing memories that you’ll talk about for the rest of your life, laughing and crying at the same time.