Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  And if that were true, it meant that there were people watching the fence… and he suspected he didn’t want to meet them.

  Or maybe he did. Because if there were people watching, and they didn’t think that three guys with guns being chased by a pack of dinosaurs isn’t enough to merit coming over for a look… then whatever they did consider a threat was probably an awful thing.

  “Keep moving, guys,” he said as they emerged from the wooded path into the first of the clearings where the cabins lay. Sked had brought them along this path so he could stash them inside the room he shared with Akane and avoid awkward questions, at least until he could think of a good story.

  Once inside, he sat the men on the bed and left Akane to cover them while he went off to get some rope. The jet ski had been tied to the dock, which meant that there would be some unused cord over there.

  The night was dark and muggy. The moon had set a few minutes before, and there was no wind to speak of. The beach was lit by torches, which had seemed romantic when they arrived, but now just macabre, disrespecting those who’d died on the island and the woman fighting for her life in the infirmary. Shadows flickered here and there, giving the impression that things moved on the beach.

  One thing didn’t move, though. The Colonel was standing, toes in the water, staring out to sea. He faced in the other direction, but Sked got the feeling that, despite this and the distance, the old man knew exactly where Sked was and what he was doing.

  He cut the cord and hurried back to the cabin, hoping Akane hadn’t shot anyone in his absence.

  She hadn’t, so he tied them up. Mike and Harold seemed resigned to their fates, but Eddie gave him chills. The man looked at him with a slightly amused expression as if thinking that a real professional would have killed all three of them already. It was a face that said that staying alive was fun because it meant that Eddie could come after them and carve them to pieces at his leisure.

  Still, Sked maintained his posture that he wouldn’t kill anyone unless it was completely necessary. He avoided Akane’s gaze, though. He knew she disagreed, and she didn’t have to do what he told her, so it was best that it didn’t become an issue.

  “Okay,” the man named Harold said. “Now what?”

  “Now we come to an agreement,” Sked replied. “I think you guys, given your… specialized skillset might be able to help us out here. Other than a couple of people—a former Colonel and a big Marine girl who looks like she could bench press the lot of us—I don’t think anyone else is going to be of any use in defending the resort from what I think is about to hit us.”

  “And you want us to help? How do you know we won’t just kill you the first time you turn around?”

  “Yeah,” Akane echoed. “I’m interested in that bit, too.”

  “I trust any Triad member who gives his word to keep it. I’ve played the game all over Asia, and I’ve never seen anyone back away from it. Do you guys value your honor in Philadelphia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then we have nothing to worry about. I call a truce. You promise not to move on us, and to help us get the hell off this place and I give you your lives.”

  Harold glared at him. “No can do. I’ve sworn oaths that are more important than this one. If my superiors ask me to kill you later, that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “I thought you said they were going to kill you.”

  “They might. But that’s their choice. I’m not breaking the oath.”

  “Kill them now,” Akane said. “He’s still working for the Chinks. He’ll put a slug in the back of your head as soon as you turn around.”

  “Wait,” Harold said. “How about we hold the truce until everyone in this room is off the island?”

  “We’ll need a couple of days after that to disappear. How about we hold it until you get orders to break it?” Sked countered.

  “How about someone tells me what is happening here?” a new voice, deep and ragged, inquired. “No, don’t turn around. Just lay the weapons on the floor very slowly.”

  Sked complied and, keeping his hands up, turned to face the man who’d interrupted them.

  “Hello, Colonel,” he said, amused to note that the man wasn’t even armed. He had only sounded armed to the teeth. “You may be able to help us out.”

  Chapter 9

  “I don’t care what you might need the ship for,” Cora said. “I have an injured woman I need to get to Andumar, and the lifeboat belongs to Mr. Lai, not to the resort. You should be thankful that he allowed you to send one of your people along in the first place.” She glared at the manager.

  The little man looked like one of those little jackasses that have to have their own way every time, and the fact that someone had given him a position of relative importance had only made him worse. He was the kind of guy, were he not protected by the outrage of a society that frowned on such things, whose lights she would happily have punched out. A large purple bruise on the bottom of his jaw, and swelling spreading across half his face made her think that someone had beat her to it. Maybe that Sked guy, who spoke the lingo and walked like a special forces soldier, even if he didn’t quite look the part.

  “I insist that you allow us…”

  “Go away, little man,” Cora said. “Send one of your people if you like.”

  He turned a beetroot shade of red, but went nowhere.

  Mr. Lai had already shepherded most of his people into the lifeboat, after first authorizing the removal of six seats—two entire rows—from the craft in order to accommodate the stricken woman. The doctor said that she should be all right to transport, but she didn’t look all right to Cora. Anyone who’d looked like that out in the field would have been given immediate Medevac, even behind enemy lines.

  So that left nine seats on the lifeboat. The first was taken by the sailor who’d driven them over. Two more went to Cora and whoever the resort sent. The other six were filled with Lai’s young executives, by the old man’s order: he charged them with making contact with the company and getting aid, as well as trying to locate the yacht, of which there had been no further sign since they abandoned ship.

  That left the cook and the surviving bunny, as well as the remaining soldiers and Mr. Lai himself to wait for rescue.

  “Are you sure you don’t want my place, sir?” she asked Lai.

  He shook his head. “No. I need someone who can kick ass if necessary on the boat. You’re the only one who qualifies. If someone panics—and those six are the most likely candidates—you can subdue them physically, which is something I can’t do.”

  “They’ll do whatever you say.”

  He shook his head again and for a moment, Cora could see his age in his features. “Only until they get scared. Once that happens, what their boss says becomes secondary, and they become panicked herd animals. I don’t think these guys are physically brave in the least.”

  “You could leave one of them behind.”

  This time he laughed. “That would land me on the front page of every newspaper in Malaysia.” He made air quotes. “Billionaire abandons employees on cannibal-infested island. Would do wonders for my image. No. It’s best that I stay here. Hell, if the cannibals and dinosaurs leave us alone, I’ll try to get some rest.”

  She didn’t like it, and would have preferred to keep him in her sight, but she had her marching orders, and she wasn’t about to start disobeying at this point in her life. “Yes, sir.” Cora turned to the manager. “Have you chosen the employee, yet?”

  “Yes. I’m coming.”

  “Don’t you need to be here to run the resort?”

  “They’ll be fine without me.” He didn’t meet her gaze. “I’m the best one to speak to the authorities.”

  Yeah, sure, Cora thought. You’re not fooling anyone, you little chickenshit coward.

  But she didn’t say it and just nodded and motioned him in ahead of her. It was easy to see why some men engendered the loyalty that Mr. Lai did while others had bruises
on their chin.

  They’d already pushed the lifeboat to the edge of the water, so it only took a few more tugs by the people left on shore to get it afloat.

  The sailor at the helm gently steered the prow into the tiny breakers and accelerated into the water.

  Cora turned back and spoke to the doctor: “How is she?”

  “Weak, but steady. If he can do it without things getting too rough, it would be best if the man at the wheel gave us all possible speed.”

  “I’ll talk to him, but I know from our earlier trip that this isn’t a fast boat.”

  “Do what you can.”

  She turned towards the front again, not because she needed to face the sailor to ask him about the ship’s performance but because she hadn’t liked the look in the doctor’s eyes. He wasn’t optimistic about the woman’s chances, but he didn’t want to say it out loud. She’d seen that look in a medic’s eyes only once, out on a training exercise in the Pacific with the Nimitz carrier group.

  A sailor had fallen from a mast onto the deck of the deployment ship she was stationed on, right when she’d been on loan to the ship’s Navy crew for the glamorous duty of sorting through garbage. The guy had landed on a generator twenty feet away and impaled himself on an exhaust port or something.

  He'd been alive when she reached him. Alive when the Navy boys working her detail had helped her pull him off the equipment and onto the floor, and alive when the medics arrived to wheel the man away on the stretcher.

  The medic, when he thanked her for acting quickly, had worn the same expression as the doctor in the lifeboat.

  After her shift, she’d gone up to the infirmary and learned that the sailor had died shortly after arrival of multiple massive internal injuries.

  It hadn’t surprised her in the least. After that, she’d found the medic and gotten drunk with him. It seemed the right thing to do.

  She took a couple of minutes to compose herself before speaking to the man driving the lifeboat. He confirmed what she already knew: the leisurely pace they boasted currently was as fast as the boat could go. It would be a long trip, made longer by the stress of having a woman on board who desperately needed them to move faster.

  “Don’t we have an emergency beacon?” she asked the sailor.

  “Yes. But those are only for ships in need of immediate relief.”

  “This counts. Hit the beacon. I’ll take responsibility for any nautical crimes we may be committing. Hell, if the Indian Coast Guard sends anything faster than this, we’ll be giving her a better chance.”

  Lai trained his men well. The guy just nodded, released a plastic rectangle meant to keep the beacon from accidental activation and mashed a big red button.

  She turned back to the doctor, surprised at how far the island seemed. They’d made nearly half a mile.

  As she opened her mouth to speak, the words caught in her throat, making an “aaaaah” sound. Her face must have shown her utter shock as well, because the doctor raised an eyebrow and turned to see what she was looking at.

  What she was looking at were teeth the size of her legs framing a mouth like Carlsbad Caverns.

  Cora did something she hadn’t done in years. She screamed. It was a gut reaction, the primate inside her suddenly released, and she stopped as soon as she realized what an un-Marine-like sound she was uttering.

  Her yell served as a warning to the others in the boat that something was very, very wrong.

  The quickest to react was the executive who’d been giving all the trouble. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the gaping maw, full of water and beginning to close, and dashed for the front of the lifeboat.

  A split second later, when he was halfway across the distance between them, the boat began to tilt backward and the rest of the passengers began to react. Most of them never got out of their seats before the boat tilted back and threw them towards the rear window and the open mouth.

  But the man who’d moved first wasn’t about to give up. He threw himself forward and reached for Cora’s outstretched hand. She grabbed his arm in midair, pulling him slowly towards her as she fought gravity.

  That was when the world became a maelstrom of noise and water.

  As Cora watched, the teeth closed around the boat, tearing through it like it was made of paper, and allowing foaming saltwater to enter from all over and swamp her. Just before her head went under, she gagged on the smell of rotting fish.

  The wall of water buffeted her around and she went down. Her mind barely had time to register what had happened before the waves took her down: something, some unimaginably colossal thing, had bitten the lifeboat in half. Only the man driving, Cora herself, and another one of Lai’s executives had been on the right side of the bite.

  Now she was underwater with no idea which way was up.

  She panicked for a second, but then she realized her training had already taken hold: she was breathing out, just enough to keep water from filling her nose. That meant she was upside down.

  There. She got herself righted and tried to open her eyes. That stung like hell and she wasn’t able to get a good bearing on where she was—the sun was always up, but had she actually spotted it?—but still, she swam towards where she thought up was. She was aware that her body might be getting its signals crossed, but there was nothing she could do about it except to keep swimming. As long as water wasn’t trying to get into her nose, she wasn’t heading towards the bottom.

  Or was she? She’d been going for longer than even a decent dipping at the hands of the monster should have accounted for. Normally, she wouldn’t be too worried about hitting the bottom, but they’d been out pretty far when they got hit. What if the bottom was a mile away?

  Her lungs burned, more a sign of her near-panicked state than a sign of having been in the water too long.

  Also, there was something wrong with her right hand: it wasn’t moving through the water the way she was expecting it to. It was dragging along as if it had been mangled. The weird part was she didn’t feel any pain. Probably the adrenalin, she thought.

  All right. She was probably going to die, so she tried opening her eyes again and forced herself to keep them open. No sun in sight, so she turned the other way. Still no sun.

  She was damned if she was going to drown without a fight. She kicked hard in the direction she thought was up. Three seconds, four seconds. She had to breathe.

  She felt weakness begin in her legs…

  Her head broke through the surface.

  Cora breathed. She would have cried for joy, but that would have meant breathing less, so she breathed and breathed. For a moment, she didn’t care that there was a gigantic monster in the water with her. She didn’t care that she had a half-mile swim ahead of her. All she wanted to do was breathe.

  And she did. It felt better than anything she’d ever experienced.

  Unfortunately, she was a Marine, and the personality traits that had made her a good one—combined with the training she’d received at the hands of even better ones—didn’t allow her to simply enjoy the feeling. She needed to assess her situation and see how to solve it.

  First off, she was still in deep shit. No way around that. The dunking and lack of air hadn’t done her stamina any good, and a half-mile swim hadn’t been fun even back when she was trained to within an inch of her life. She didn’t know the sea or currents around the island either, which just added to the joy.

  Secondly. She had to check that arm. It was dragging along in the water. She turned to look, expecting to find a bloody stump where her hand had been.

  She found a bloody stump, but it wasn’t hers. She was still holding the hand of the man who’d jumped for her in the lifeboat. The hand, most of the forearm… and nothing else. That was what she had been dragging along.

  “Yuck,” she said and pried the dead fingers off her before throwing the arm out as far as she could.

  The action galvanized her. She turned to the island, aimed for the resort and, silently singing
an obscene Marine marching song in her head, she swam.

  And swam, and swam. The island looked like it wasn’t getting any closer.

  She’d done this before, though, and knew how it worked. She put her head down and swam some more.

  This time, when she looked up, the shore was visibly nearer.

  But there was something else. A dark point just in front of her bobbed up and down. Had someone else survived?

  It would be the one bright spot in the unmitigated disaster that was the end of her professional career. Now, she couldn’t even save the ones that were in her sight. She wondered if the Foreign Legion accepted people her age… or whether she would have to join one of the mercenary organizations in Africa. She was tough, but those units were hell on women.

  She swam towards the black point. She didn’t think about the massive ugly in the water with them. If that thing decided it needed a light snack after chomping the boat, there was nothing at all she could do to stop it. She didn’t know what it was, except that it was neither a fish nor a whale. Its skin looked more like the smooth leather of a giant crocodile… but that wasn’t it either.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she needed to get back on land. Water wasn’t her element and while the creature might be able to walk on land—where it would be formidable indeed—at least Cora knew how to defend herself there.

  So she swam.

  To her surprise, the dot didn’t get closer. Whoever was swimming out there was as good as she was and keeping his lead. She didn’t expect that of the executives, but it would have made sense for the sailor driving the lifeboat to swim well.

  Eternal minutes later, arms and legs afire, she was helped onto the beach by the Colonel and the guy who called himself Sked. As soon as her body was fully out of the water, she collapsed onto the floor beside the other swimmer, arms and legs burning.