Using the ocean for a morning bath was hygienically dubious, but eminently logical in this circumstance, which was: we were living on an island with a limited supply of fresh water.
This is one of the many, many things people who visit tropical locations like this don’t take into account. It’s also why I’ve spent so little time on tropical islands, to be honest. History is littered with accounts of shipwrecked sailors finding their way to remote islands and subsisting—barely—off of the land until rescued. Or not rescued, and found later looking much thinner and no longer alive. We as a species are now vacationing in places that used to kill us.
I’ve mostly stayed away from spots like this because it was hard to get my mind around the idea that isolation of this sort was a beautiful thing. Historically, I’ve taken vacations from mankind for hundreds of years by heading into the wilderness and fending for myself. This was whenever I felt it was time to disengage, or when I didn’t trust myself around people, or when humankind was going through one of its really bad periods and I didn’t want to deal with anyone involved.
So I know from isolation. But those vacations were in the wilderness of the Eurasian continent, or Africa. There is a substantial difference between living alone on a continent and living alone on an island.
Fresh water is the biggest difference. This island had a natural spring replenished by runoff from the hills, but the spring was not bottomless and it wasn’t near us. Every resident got a supply each month, and tourists used the rest. If we needed more we had to buy it, which was possible only if a water shipment made it from one of the not-at-all-nearby ports attached to proper continents. If there wasn’t a shipment, well, too bad. No water for you.
A regular supply of rain helped. Most of the buildings on the island had Bermuda roofs, which were designed to catch and funnel rain water into a tank. From there it went through a ridiculously expensive filtration system and into another tank, which we then used for things like showers, the washing dishes, and making ice cubes to go with the cheaper bourbon. To supplement the water in the fist tank, we also had an air conditioning system that doubled as a de-humidifier, and a device under the house that caught water off the mountain during the heavier storms.
Honestly, the tank—the second one—was almost always full, but sometime shortly after we moved, Mirella tapped into the collective water-rationing mania of the rest of the islanders. As a consequence, I couldn’t take showers as often as I liked.
I’m sure it seemed like a minor inconvenience to her, but hot showers is near the top of my list of reasons I’m glad I’m still alive.
Food is another thing that can be scarce on an island. Large land animals on a continent aren’t really a problem as long as you know where they run to and how to catch them. On an island, who knows? There are only so many waterfowl you can eat before you start wondering what the other sailors taste like.
I didn’t know what animals were indigenous to this island because I never hunted on it. We hadn’t had anything big wander into our living room yet, so maybe there weren’t any, but it was also possible they were just too polite. Or, the devices mounted every ten feet around the deck to keep the bugs out—I think they emit an ultrasonic frequency or maybe a chemical or something, I don’t know—also drove away game.
We ate a lot of fruits and vegetables, and ridiculous quantities of seafood. The vegetables were mostly from local gardens—the soil was volcanic, so plants grew insanely well—while the fruit was wild, and could be found more or less anywhere.
Once a year we bought a cow that someone was kind enough to slaughter and ship to us. We stored the parts in a freezer and pulled out the beef on special occasions or when the local fish looked off. Rumors of wild boar on the island had yet to yield us any opportunities for pork, so of course that was what I ended up craving almost daily.
The other problem with islands was the isolation from the outside world. That would have been a major issue if we were stranded, but we weren’t.
I thought I’d miss the world. Except for the occasional trip into a forest here and there, I have been waist-deep in humanity for well over two thousand years. At first that was by choice, because those were a really interesting two thousand years—except for maybe parts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, which kind of sucked—and I had no interest in exiting. Then it became a thing where I couldn’t figure out how to exit, because the world ran out of wilderness. Sure, there’s still some here and there, but nothing on the scale I’m used to. I once lived for a hundred years in woods that were only a day’s walk from downtown Athens, and you can’t say that about a whole lot of places any longer. Maybe the Amazon.
That was before Mirella brought me to this island.
You’re probably wondering why I haven’t told you where it is or what the name of it is. That’s because I’m not going to tell you. It’s in the South Pacific, but that’s all you’re going to get.
Yes, it’s a bona fide, honest-to-god secret island.
I know, I couldn’t believe it either.
* * *
Mirella climbed back up from the ocean, dried herself off and put on a proper set of clothes. We made a meal, and then went about doing not much of anything. I was reading a book and she was teaching herself how to paint, so we both did those things. Later, we would probably make a dinner, pick a movie, pick a wine, make love, sleep until sunrise, and start all over again.
Life had slowed down. Our only connection to the outside world was a satellite dish we used to rent movies, plus a very occasional foray onto the Internet to make sure nobody had blown up the planet while we were away, and that was all.
It was exactly the sort of break I needed, but failed at a decade earlier when it was a different island and a different girl. Back then, the girl wasn’t really interested in quiet and isolation, so what was a planned vacation from the world became a thing where the world was being kept from her and it was my fault.
I hadn’t heard a word of complaint from Mirella, but the circumstances were a little different. She picked the location and bought the house. I was just along for the ride.
“Hey,” I said over my shoulder, putting down the book. “I was going to head into town.”
Mirella was in front of her easel, staring at whatever it was she was painting. I wasn’t allowed to look at it.
“Did you finish your book already?”
The books came from the island’s remarkably extensive library. It was probably my favorite place other than our house and the pub. In another hundred years I’d probably be downloading books from an online library instead. I wasn’t ready.
“I did.”
She snuck a glance at the bar on the other side of the room. We had a fully stocked bar, a modest wine cabinet, and a beer fridge. She would never say it, but she was trying to remember if she’d seen me having anything to drink yet. I hadn’t.
I’d been good about the drinking. I learned I should only drink as much as Mirella does—which wasn’t all that inconvenient, since she was hardly a light drinker when committed to it.
She had no interest in me when I was drunk and she was sober, though. Again, she hadn’t said this; it was just something I figured out.
“Swap the spare while you’re out. Don’t kill any trees.”
* * *
As I said, the island is volcanic, but that only means it was formed by a volcanic eruption a long time ago and not—necessarily—that there’s an active volcano on the premises.
This is an important distinction, because I do not have a great history with volcanoes. I lived on Minos when the volcano on nearby Thera destroyed the whole region, and I lived beneath Mount Vesuvius at exactly the worst time to live under Mount Vesuvius. Statistically, given how long I’ve lived, I’m bound to end up near a volcano at the wrong time, so it’s not a huge surprise that I’ve had issues with them, but that doesn’t mean I’m willing to just assume the next one I’m near isn’t about to go off.
So w
e didn’t have a volcano, but we did have a hill. Some called it a mountain, but it was a hill. The top of the island was only about a thousand feet above sea level, and there were homes to be found all the way up to—but not at—the top, which was something you don’t see all that often on real mountains. All the properties above four hundred feet were called mountaintop estates, which was just good marketing, because hillside houses sounded less impressive. I couldn’t be sure, but it was possible the decision to call the thing a mountain began with a marketing campaign.
There were access roads leading up to the estates: long, narrow, windy little paths I’m pretty sure used to be much wider, because I didn’t see a lot of easy ways to get building supplies up to the top and there were some pretty awesome houses up there. Plant overgrowth had turned the roads into something slightly wider than a footpath since whenever the houses were built, though, and for that reason I’d have just as soon taken an ATV or just walked down to the lower island.
I had to take the mammoth SUV, though, because Mirella asked me to swap the spare generator.
There was a power grid on the island and we were connected to it, but the grid wasn’t particularly reliable, so we worked off of generator power about half the time. It was rarely an issue because we didn’t use a ton of electricity and were both capable of roughing it for long periods. It could still be a pain, though, like if the power failed in the middle of a movie or the food wasn’t done cooking yet. As romantic as candlelight dinners on the deck overlooking the ocean could be, they were also a little annoying multiple days in a row. Plus the things we used to keep insects out ran on electrical power.
It had to be the SUV because the generator was too heavy to carry down and didn’t fit on the all-terrain vehicle, and if it did it would just fall off at the first steep hill.
The problem was, I should not drive a motorized vehicle of any kind under any circumstances. On the ATV, at least, the goal was to throw oneself down a hill. Those were practically built for someone like me. But I’m terrible on roads. They could be flat, wide and well lit and I’d find a way to do something wrong with a car on them.
The island roads weren’t wide or flat, and were only as well lit as the vegetation allowed the sun to make them. And the SUV was so wide it might have been square. It was a bad confluence of people and things.
Mirella trusted me to make this run alone because it was only about five miles to the bottom of the island, and about half of it was on a road that was literally impossible to drive off of. I could, however, damage trees on the way down, which I had done.
She may also have been operating under the errant assumption that I would be getting better at driving with time. I don’t expect to.
Also, she probably didn’t feel like going.
The trip down was pleasantly uneventful, but probably took a lot longer than it had to, because I was determined to make it down without taking any more paint off the side of the car.
Mankind should not ever build vehicles this big and then make them single-operator machines. Anything this large should require a team of competent people to operate and should only be used when storming battlements or breaking ice.
For about a year, I took to calling the SUV the “Hubris” because I think that’s a good brand name for it. Mirella either thought I was just saying “Humvee” wrong or decided to ignore me. It was hard to tell.
Most of the lower island was dedicated to keeping tourists happy.
The island was very much a tourist destination, but only for a certain type of tourist, and only for the very select few of this type that could afford the cost of the vacation. Lower island was for them, because it was where one found the pretty white sands and the high-end hotel and the real bungalows: one-room shacks that were right up against the water when the tide is high. The hotel—there was really only one—was far more luxurious than anything in the bungalows, but somehow the bungalows were costlier. I didn’t know why, but I was still adjusting to remote islands being a good place to go, so I wasn’t the best person to ask.
The bottom of the island was also where the main public dock was, and the one proper town, if one could call anything this size a town. It had the public buildings—the local government was the approximate equivalent of a condo association—and all the stores and restaurants and so on.
There was also the library—which was much more useful to residents than tourists—the grocer, and the liquor store, and so on. A little further out, closer to the base of the mountain but still a part of the lower island properties, there were squat apartment complexes and other iterations of shared living space for the employees whose jobs were to keep tourists happy. And of course the airport was down-island, such as it was. We could only land planes at low tide because the runway was underwater the rest of the time.
I really didn’t have any kind of ulterior motive for visiting the town, in case you’re wondering. I had to pick up a couple of new things to read, swap the generator while I was there, maybe get some decent gossip from the two or three people I could rely upon for such a thing, and that was all. As I said, life had slowed down, and I was enjoying that fact very much. Two years in, I couldn’t see any reason to do something different.
This probably sounds boring, and maybe it is. It’s possible I have no compass to help determine boring, or maybe I have a different threshold than most people. From my perspective, though, the vast majority of human history has been boring, by which I mean nothing happened, and sure, that can be dull. On the other hand, nothing happening includes nobody trying to kill anybody, and specifically, nobody trying to kill me. That’s the kind of boring a guy can get behind. I’ve learned to appreciate that version of boring, in other words, because the alternative is often far less pleasant.
* * *
I parked the SUV in the lot behind the general store. It only took three tries to get the thing into an appropriately parked position, and I didn’t hit anybody, but in fairness there wasn’t anybody around. The roads didn’t support a lot of traffic, and conveniently enough there wasn’t a lot of traffic on a regular basis. Or so it always seemed to me. It was possible every time I took the car down the mountain, Mirella picked up the landline and warned everyone that I was on my way. That was something she would do.
The parking lot was flattened loose gravel without any proper lines drawn, which was nice because it meant I was never in the wrong space. I got out, jumped down, and headed for the back entrance. As I said, it was a beautiful, sunny day, with a light breeze. There was a constant whiff of ocean in every breath from just about every point on the island. It was impossible to forget the ocean was there even when it wasn’t visible.
I was wearing flip-flops. I feel like this is an important thing to confess. Flip-flops, cargo shorts, a sleeveless t-shirt, and a pair of sunglasses. I was dressed the way a guy on permanent vacation should dress. I felt like a Roman senator inside the city gates, except there was no garrison of soldiers surrounding us, just a large body of water.
I had developed something like a permanent tan over the past two years and only wore shoes of any kind when the odds were decent I was going to be walking across gravel or seashells—a distressing number of surfaces here were made of crushed shells—or into an eating establishment of some sort. This was great because I don’t actually like shoes. I see no point in them except under circumstances of extreme cold, but since the modern world likes to create surfaces that are unfriendly to bare feet I don’t have much of a choice.
I’d carried the generator to the back of the car myself, but I wasn’t about to do that when taking it into the store, both because it was a stupid thing to do in the first place—I did it because I didn’t want to ask Mirella to help because for some reason I thought that was embarrassing—and because the store had a rack of two-wheelers at the rear door for this exact purpose. So instead I flip-flopped across the gravel and grabbed one.
And that was when the demon came up behind me.
2<
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The demon was nearly seven feet tall, with an ugly flat face and a hairless head. His three-fingered hand gripped the doorframe as he shouldered his way through a space that wasn’t really large enough to accommodate a being with his dimensions.
His name was Leonard. He was a pretty cool guy.
“Hi Adam, howzit going?”
“Hi Lenny!”
I said this a bit too loudly, because my first reaction on seeing any demon—even one who meant me no harm—was to panic. It’s a pretty normal response, and the correct one about 99% of the time.
“Just switching out the portable,” I added, in a more modulated tone.
“Yeah? No, no, put that cart away, lemme get it for you.”
He got the rest of the way through the doorframe and headed for the SUV. I wasn’t going to argue, because one doesn’t argue with demons, especially ones who aren’t trying to kill you. Or so I have to assume; Leonard was actually the first one I’d met who wasn’t trying to kill either me or someone nearby.
Demons aren’t some sort of hell-beast in any real supernatural heaven/hell sense, so everyone put away the bibles and calm down. They are large, thuggish monstrosities with skin thick enough to walk across gravel parking lots in bare feet—as he was doing—and take a knife cut without bleeding. They’re nearly indestructible warriors of low intelligence with short tempers and an almost unparalleled bloodlust that makes them exceedingly difficult to control in large numbers.
Armies led by a vanguard of demons tended to win more often than not, so long as there weren’t that many demons. More than a few—I think it may have been Genghis Khan who worked out the magic number of seven demons per battle, max—and they tended to just start killing everybody regardless of banner.
Immortal and the Island of Impossible Things (The Immortal Series Book 4) Page 2