The Island - The Final Chapters

by Michael Stark

  They moved in a triangle shape. The one in front kept his attention, feinting in only to scamper away the instant he swung the gun. Once he had committed himself, one of the other two would strike, rushing in with bared claws and swiping at his back. Blood seeped down one leg. Another bright slash ran across his back. Even more gushed from a wound above his temple. Any time he tried to counter the attacking imp, he left himself wide open for one of the others.

  He didn’t have a chance. Like wolves worrying prey, they were wearing him down, waiting for the right moment when his reflexes had slowed, when they could minimize the danger to themselves. When it came, they would be on him, first one, and when it had his attention, the other two. Keith would go down in a snarl of claws and teeth. Once down, he would never get back up. They would gorge on hot blood and meat so fresh it trembled and jerked.

  The Marlin still held three rounds. When I had set up watches, I’d loaded one into the chamber in order to slide an extra in the tube magazine, a process my father called hot loading. The math looked good - three rounds, three boogey men. The problem lay on the other side of the equal sign. The imps were too close to Keith for a clear shot. Worse, they darted and feinted constantly. I could burn off all three just trying to hit one of them.

  I didn’t think I had to get all three though. Animals that exhibit pack behavior tend to break off an attack when they lose the advantage in numbers. After each lunge, the little demon in front would pause for a brief instant to wait for the next opportunity. I raised the Marlin, aiming it about three feet off Keith’s right, figuring I would let one come to me rather than trying to trace its bobbing, weaving path. A few seconds later one of the beasts rose into sight, off centered by only a couple of inches. I didn’t even bother trying to aim for a better shot, but simply pulled the trigger.

  The bullet took the little bastard just under the juncture of arm and body, a little more toward its backside than in the middle. The 30-30 round delivered two thousand pounds of knock down power that close. I didn’t have to guess about my aim. It looked as if God had reached down and flicked the annoying little pest away. The round catapulted it through the air a good twenty feet and blasted a chunk the size of a baseball out the other side in the process.

  The report boomed against the side of the station. The two remaining imps scattered. One shot up. The other turned and fled toward the ocean. I drew a bead on the one heading for the sky, but missed.

  Keith stumbled backward and sat down heavily next to the porch. He looked exhausted. His face glistened with sweat. His breath came fast and shallow like a dog trying to beat back the heat of a summer day. He sat trembling, blood dripping down his face. I knew the feeling. Adrenaline surging through your veins is a wonderful thing when you need it. The aftermath sucks. The instant you don’t need it, your body turns into a quivering mass so shaky and weak you wonder how you stood up ten seconds earlier.

  “That was fucked up,” he grunted.

  A low moan sounded behind me. I turned to see Devon beginning to stir. Joshua’s body lay just beyond, bloodied and still.

  Not much light remained. Every minute wasted meant another minute wandering around in the dark. I’d had enough of that to last a lifetime.

  “We have to get him inside and strapped down - not in the sick room, but downstairs where the people on watch can keep an eye on him.”

  I looked out over the forest. “And then I have to see if I can find where the big one went down.”

  The younger man glanced up. “Why? Why not wait until morning?”

  I pointed in the direction where the dragon had disappeared. “I can’t. That big flying lizard had a kid on its back. Don’t ask me why. Maybe that’s the equivalent of a dragon lunch box. Snatch up a body here and there. Eat them later. Either way, I can’t leave a child out there tonight.”

  “I’ll come with you,” he said, the determination strong in his voice.

  I shook my head and nodded toward Devon.

  “I don’t want to leave Elsie alone with him. We can’t leave Joshua lying out here all night either.”

  I let out a long sigh and rubbed my eyes. With the danger past, the weariness that had eaten at me all day flooded back with a vengeance. Even thinking seemed an effort.

  “Get a sheet from the station. Wrap Joshua up and put him in the back of the Suburban. It’s about the best place we have right now. Where’s Tyler, by the way?”

  He leaned his head back toward the station, “Devon flattened him on the way out. I was downstairs when I heard the thump. It sounded like someone had dropped an anvil on the ceiling,” he said. “I headed up and saw Tyler sprawled out near the door to the sick room. Then Devon staggered out and took a swing at me too.”

  “How’d he get the shotgun?”

  His lips tightened. “I don’t know.”

  I glanced at Joshua, lying on his back in the sand, his midsection torn into a grisly mess. I hadn’t known any of them long. A few weeks in terms of a lifetime barely makes a blip on the graph. Not long after the first meeting in the center of town, Elsie had asked me which I trusted most. I’d said Joshua, mostly because he seemed friendly and laid back. He presented an easy personality to deal with, unlike Devon who grated, Tyler who seemed young and arrogant, and Keith who I’d pegged as lazy for no reason other than the extra pounds he carried. I’d stereotyped them all in my simple way of thinking and done them an injustice because of it.

  Joshua had been slow to anger, thoughtful and willing to do his share. Not only would I miss him, I’d lost an anchor among the younger people.

  Lesson learned and a shitty one at that.

  The door leading into the station swung open. Tyler stumbled out. I studied the thick, angry welt that ran temple to jaw. Swelling had already set in. By morning, half his face would be purple.

  “What did he hit you with?”

  He shot a sullen look at Devon.

  “That bar Keith put up to lock down the shutters. I never saw it coming.”

  “You alright?”

  He nodded. “I got a broke tooth, but yeah, I’m alright.”

  “Feel up to helping get him into the station and strapped down?”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. “I’m more than up for it. There won’t be any sucker punches this time.”

  I handed the rifle to Keith and picked up the shotgun. Inside the forest, the only shot available would be at close quarters. The rifle would win a test of accuracy any day, but up close, the shotgun would make a bigger hole.

  “Strap him down good. We don’t need any more surprises,” I told them and headed inside for ammunition.

  I pocketed a handful of shells after reloading the Benelli. The effort of digging through the crates left me feeling winded and nauseous. I leaned against the door jam and waited for my stomach to settle down.

  “Take out the plug when you get back, William,” I said out loud, following a study tactic I’d learned in college where enunciating a thought seemed to boost my memory retention by an astronomical factor. “No more excuses. Do it tonight.”

  Removing the plug would nearly double the magazine’s capacity, giving us five rounds in the gun rather than three. Even as I said it, I knew I wouldn’t. The thought of doing anything except what had to be done felt as appealing as pulling my own teeth with a pair of pliers.

  Kate sat at the table, still looking as if she was deep in shock. Elsie sat beside her, talking to her.

  I glanced out the station windows into the deepening gloom. What little light remained was fading fast. In thirty minutes, the passage from day to night would be complete. I had no desire to go wandering around in the forest looking for a monster I’d just shot out of the air. At the same time, I had no choice. I couldn’t leave a child to face the night alone. I’d done that once in my life and would never do it again.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Alarm shot across her face.

  “Where are you going?”

  “That dragon
thing had a kid on its back. I’m going to look for it,” I said as stoutly as possible, hoping to avoid the debate I could see flaring in her eyes. When it came to walking through the woods at night or arguing with Elsie, both tasks seemed as daunting as the other. To my surprise, she simply nodded.

  I left her and made my way outside. Tyler and Keith had Devon hanging between them. They looked more than capable of handling him, especially now that they knew the threat. I left them to it, headed down the ramp that led off to the side yard, and started for the trees. The soft boom of the surf off to my left reminded that I’d come to this island seeking peace, not just the superficial aspects of warm days, cool nights, and campfires but a deeper, reconnecting type of peace that came with solace and memories. Nothing about life had been peaceful from the day I had arrived. Yet, in many ways, I was doing exactly what my father would have wanted. He had never been the type to sit and wait for bad things to come to him. He would have been eager to make the confrontation on his terms.

  “Got any words of wisdom tonight, Dad?” I asked out loud, glancing toward the sky. A raindrop fell from the dense, gray overcast and smacked against my cheek. Another tapped against leaves of the trees ahead. One by one, fat, heavy drops plummeted toward the earth.

  I had to grin. Years before, when we both worked in his wood shop at night, me experimenting with pipes for chimes and my father working on Angel, he would watch me grow frustrated at trying to make metal sing perfect notes rather than spit out the jarring and jangling clang of sharps and flats. One night, when I’d flung a pipe angrily in the corner and sat back ready to quit, he’d climbed aboard the sailboat and grasped the wheel. Swaying like a man standing in a hurricane, he’d shouted commands to invisible sailors.

  “Take in the main sheet, ye scurvy rogues.”

  “Belay that line, seaman.”

  “Hoist the storm sail! Quickly, ye dogs of ye mother’s wombs.”

  I’d watched a while and then started laughing. “Dogs of ye mother’s wombs?”

  He had leaned back, grinning. “Yes William, that’s the people who give up. You know, the ones destined to be commanded through life rather than figuring out how to live it.”

  The rain sounded heavier inside the tree line as the gentle far-off hiss turned hard and heavy against the leaves overhead. Occasionally, fat drops punched craters into the wet sand in front of me. White tendrils of fog drifted across the sandy lane, slipping out from shadows so deep and dark that it looked as if night had already come to portions of the forest.

  I stopped a few feet inside and studied the treetops. The beast had blazed a path of broken branches through them. Green leaves carpeted the dirt road. It couldn’t have gone far, not with the tree cover growing thicker and stouter as it fell. Sooner or later, it would run head first into an oak that had more stopping power than it had momentum.

  I worked the slide on the shotgun. The distinctive click-clack of a round sliding home proved both satisfying and reassuring. The bore of a twelve gauge is almost three quarters of an inch in diameter. Looking at it from the wrong end feels like staring down the barrel of a canon. I doubted the beast would find it that daunting, but a couple of rounds of buckshot in the eyes might teach it to be a bit more respectful. I had no illusions about the stopping power of a shotgun when it came to dragons. If I ran into the beast and it still lived, I’d blind it if I couldn’t kill it. The crappy thing about being human and facing something like a dragon boiled down to it possessing all the strength, size, and teeth. On the flip side, it had to come at me with its face exposed. I doubted the shot would penetrate all the way to the brain, but the slug I’d loaded might.

  The road ran parallel to the dunes. I followed it as far as I could, ignoring the mosquitoes and using the loose sand to mask the sound of my footsteps. About a hundred feet in, the trail of broken tree limbs and shattered bits of wood angled off toward the swamp. I eased off the roadway onto a jungle of heavy brush carpeted with a thick bed of moss and decaying leaves. I made it five steps before I started cursing the huge brambles snaking through the wall of vegetation. Not only had I been rendered effectively blind, but briers tore at my clothes and skin like hungry little teeth.

  The brush offered little respite. What didn’t bite, rip, or tear licked at me with cold, wet tongues. Simply brushing against a sapling shook loose a cold shower of heavy drops. I hadn’t gone twenty yards before I was soaked and my clothing lay plastered to my skin.

  I stopped long enough to listen and heard the beast rather than saw it. The hiss of air exhaled slid through the forest like the wind whispering through the trees. I followed the sound cautiously, easing my way ahead as silently as I could. A few minutes later, something moved against the dim outline of a gray tree trunk. I pulled up short and stood motionless. Eventually, the form resolved into the tip of a wing rising and falling in tandem with the labored breath.

  My senses were so tuned to the sound of the beast that I nearly passed the body before I realized the white splotch on the ground belonged to a face turned sideways. I knelt and held my fingers close to the person’s mouth while keeping an eye on the flopping wing. Warm breath washing over them told me he or she hadn’t died in the crash. The he or she question resolved itself moments later when those same fingers ran over stubble forming on his cheek. The quick inspection also nixed the child-like image in my mind. The guy had to be at least six feet tall.

  I reached down again, intending to ease him toward a large tree. I found blood that time, lots of it. When I lifted my hands, they looked black in the dim light and felt like I’d dipped them into warm motor oil. I sighed and moved him anyway. Every medical text I’d ever read indicated that accident victims should be immobilized. None of them had been written for crash survivors whose more immediate concern revolved around being eaten as opposed to suffering a spinal injury.

  Another predator crossed my mind as I wrestled him behind the tree trunk. That one came with a briefcase, a tie tight enough to choke sense out of most brains, and questionable human origins. After a moment’s thought, I dismissed the idea. Lawyers across the world were probably rubbing their hands in unabashed glee at the mountain of lawsuits they’d file once things returned to normal. My little intervention between man and dragon wouldn’t even make a blip on their radar.

  The effort left me nauseated and weary. I leaned back against the tree with my knees up against my chest and waited for the sickening wave to pass. Sweat poured off my forehead and not all of it from the feeling worming its way through my insides. Neither Jessie nor Devon had evidenced an upset stomach. I found some reason for hope in that fact. Still, the fear lingered that the nausea hadn’t come from bad food, but from a fever that killed her and was busy killing him. I’d come to the island resigned to the fact that the lonely strip of sand would most likely be the last place I ever visited. The sense of futility built into that decision meant nothing when faced with the reality of dying. I couldn’t stop The Fever, but had better epitaphs in mind for my tombstone than Victim. Most carried words like old age or long life.

  The breath hissing through the forest like steam pouring out of a train reminded me that ending up as dinner wouldn’t be pleasant either. I edged away from the tree and crawled through the brush. The crash site had smashed a clearing in the dense forest. When I pulled away the last branch obscuring my vision, I breathed a sigh of relief. Not even dragon necks were designed to bend at such an impossibly sharp angle.

  A tall oak just ahead of the heaving body bore the marks of the impact. As ferocious as the creature had looked in the air, it had been no match for the tree. Humanity might vanish from the face of the earth, but the earth itself would live on. Fifty years later, the gouges torn across the thick bark would tighten into thin scars and no one would ever imagine they pointed to the violence committed in that spot.

  I’d intended to put a slug in the thing’s brain. After seeing the neck folded back on top of itself, I turned and headed back to the man.

&nb
sp; Pulling him up felt like trying to lift a six foot long rubber bag filled with water. Arms and legs fell at awkward angles. His head flopped back, exposing a long expanse of blood-spattered throat. I carried him out in the only fashion I could manage and still bring the Benelli. He went up and over my shoulder.

  Despite the weariness washing through my body, I moved as quickly as possible. The position couldn’t be good for wounds and, honestly, I didn’t care for the blood leaking down my chest.

  I could barely lift my feet by the time I reached the station. Sweat poured down my face. The gnawing feeling of nausea in my stomach had blossomed into a raging need to empty its contents.

  The door hadn’t been barred yet. I flung it open. Elsie and Denise looked up from the table. Devon lay strapped to the bed he’d been using in the sick room. Someone had positioned it in the far corner near the windows. Keith came around the corner a few seconds later, with his shirt unbuttoned and his hair wet. The fresh look on his face told me he’d spent a few minutes with cold water and a cast iron tub.

  Every head inside jerked toward the door. Expressions of alarm first gave way to relief and then backtracked toward fear.

  Elsie rose from behind the table. “You found the child?”

  I scrunched up my face. “Ummmm, not quite.”

  “What then?” she demanded.

  I strode across the floor and laid the man out on the sofa. When I stepped back, my breath caught in my chest. The thing looked as if it had once been human. It had all the right parts, a head, arms, legs, and presumably the rest underneath his clothing. That’s where the resemblance ended.

  The face looked older than the earth, the skin so pale it seemed it had never seen the sun. Sweat gleamed off a totally bald head that looked as if it had been cleaved in half at some point. A great canyon of a scar ran across one eye, up through a nearly hairless eyebrow, and stitched its way across his scalp. Stained teeth, worn so thin that blackened gums showed between them like dark passageways into the pit beyond, looked like yellow nails driven into his mouth.