Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  It was the doctor.

  For a moment, dismay warred with disbelief. Dismay that the people she was paid to protect had died. Disbelief that anything in the back half of the lifeboat had survived to tell the tale. She’d seen the teeth snap shut. That was it. It had to be it.

  She was still panting hard, but she sat up, just to prove that Marines were tougher than doctors—even than this doctor, who seemed to be indestructible—and caught his eye. “How the hell did you get out?” she said. “I saw you die.”

  The man didn’t answer immediately. He got on all fours and then, with difficulty, onto his knees. “Lactic acidosis,” he grimaced. “I barely made it.”

  “I was right behind you. If you’d gone under, I would have gone after you.”

  “You barely made it out yourself. But to answer your question, I saw myself die as well. The teeth…” he shuddered. “I was saved because a piece of one of the seats caught between two of the teeth. I grabbed it and held on when it swallowed everything and everyone else. So when it opened its mouth to chomp the rest of the boat, I was still in the mouth. I got the hell out of there and swam away as fast as I could.”

  “Did anyone else make it?”

  He studied the sand before raising his head and holding her gaze. “I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t check. I just swam for my life.”

  She suddenly realized she’d done the same. Of course, in her case it was mostly because she hadn’t known which way was up, but after getting out of the water, she hadn’t even thought about looking for other survivors. “Yeah, me too,” she said. It hurt like hell to admit it, but she wasn’t one to run from hard truths.

  The doctor’s gaze never wavered. “You didn’t have a patient to think of. I did.”

  Anger flashed. “I was responsible for everyone on that lifeboat. They’re all dead, except for you. And that was no thanks to me.”

  “Enough,” the Colonel said. “I saw what happened out there. Irene and I were walking along the beach and we saw the whole thing. No one could have predicted that monster, and no one would have been able to do anything. Just surviving and getting back here was superhuman. So stop pretending to be more noble than you are and pick yourselves up.” He gave Cora a glare that she knew well. Hell, it was the kind of look she’d used on noobs in her unit until she retired. “Get up, soldier.”

  It hurt like hell—something she suspected the Colonel already knew—but she got up. She even stood at attention. Had she been up for inspection, the man would have had no cause for complaint.

  “With all due respect, sir, I was responsible for those people. And it’s not just moping. I failed completely and everyone’s dead.”

  “Yes, they are. And you probably won’t be keeping your job. But none of that matters. The job isn’t done yet. You can feel sorry for yourself when it is.”

  “Yes, sir.” She nearly saluted, but caught herself. She wasn’t a soldier anymore, even if the old man was playing on her training. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of a complete victory.

  But even as she walked off to confront Lai, she smiled. That old bastard of an officer knew exactly what to say to her. She’d heard he was SAS, and by his age, he would have been a young commando in the middle of both The Troubles and the first Iraq War. He'd probably seen a thing or two in his time.

  Lai was unrecognizable, his gaze fixed out beyond the horizon.

  “I’m sorry, sir. I tried.”

  He shook his head and focused on her. “I know. I never thought… monsters. Real ones. I’m glad you got out.”

  “I wish I’d gotten the rest of them out. I know you valued them.”

  “I know you didn’t like them, but they were bright men. They had futures. Some of them had young families. They were my next generation of managers, the people I was going to trust to run my companies so I could take a rest.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Lai chuckled, a little of his former personality returning to his face. “You are the only person I’ve ever met who would blame themselves for losing people to Godzilla.”

  “I trained to fight stuff much more dangerous, and smarter than an overgrown fish, sir.”

  Her boss’ recovery was complete. He looked at her with a piercing gaze. “Back then you knew what you would be fighting,” he replied levelly. “So now that you know, what’s the plan?”

  “You mean my plan for dealing with armed cannibals, hungry chickensaurs and Godzilla water monsters?”

  “Yes. That and finding out who put them here so I can get revenge for this.”

  “That’s all you want from me?”

  “Even if you resign, you still work for me until the end of the month. It was in our agreement.”

  How the hell he could remember what he’d signed with every single one of his people was beyond her, but if he said it, it was true.

  “I’ll need to think about it.”

  “Hurry,” Lai said. “I suspect we’ll be needing that plan before long.”

  “I think I’ll talk to the Colonel,” she replied. “And to that Sked character. He knows more than he’s saying.”

  “Good. I’ll let you get to it.”

  ***

  Sabrina played the video again. She watched the colossal jaws close over the lifeboat and tear it to shreds. It was marvelous to see, but she was concerned about Shiva’s stomach. That was a lot of fiberglass to digest.

  Even so, Jermaine would be ecstatic. You couldn’t create better publicity than this. She’d been disappointed that the Vanarisa hadn’t sunk after all, and that it was still afloat a few miles off the island, caught on a sandbar where her beasties couldn’t reach it. But the drones had confirmed that it wasn’t going anywhere for the time being. The crew had lashed a lifeboat to the side to keep it steady and a couple of men were attempting to make repairs.

  They could deal with the yacht later. In its current state, Shiva or Kali would make quick work of it.

  In the meantime, they also needed to deal with the people on the island. If they were killed by the dinosaurs, they served as actors in company commercials, albeit unwilling ones.

  If they survived, they were witnesses.

  Jermaine had been very clear on that: there could be no witnesses.

  But that, too, was a problem for another time. Right now, she wanted to watch that lifeboat die again. And then she’d watch the footage of the Compsognathus killing that woman in the cage.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  That clip was lovely. Even better than the one with the Chinese men in the dark. Pity that some of those guys had made it over the fence.

  She relaxed in bed and selected the next one to watch again.

  Chapter 10

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Sked said.

  Akane looked up. She was doing a crossword puzzle… which seemed utterly unbelievable on a number of levels. For one thing, Akane wasn’t the kind of person who did crossword puzzles.

  But it went deeper than that. Quite aside from the puzzle itself, Akane was more relaxed than he’d ever seen her. Normally she was taut as a bowstring just before the arrow was released. She lived at high-energy and high velocity, crashed for a few hours and then did it again. There was no halt, little pause. Even just after making love, she was thinking about the next step, staying in bed only moments after they were done, maybe to smoke something—never a joint, and never tobacco, and Sked never accepted a drag when she offered… he didn’t even want to know—and then began to pace like a caged lion.

  And now she was lying on a beach lounge chair doing a crossword puzzle while men sent to kill her wandered around on the beach beside her.

  The worst part about it was that she knew perfectly well that their situation was precarious. Not only were the Triads a threat—albeit a temporarily abated one—but there were also the small matters of the cannibals, the dinosaurs and the sea monster that had trapped them on the island so they couldn’t escape either of the aforementioned problems.

/>   Apparently, however, that threat level was so much lower than what Akane was used to in her everyday existence that she needed to entertain herself with crosswords…

  Sked couldn’t begin to imagine what the rest of her life was like, and he suspected she would never let him in far enough to actually see. Their relationship pretty much consisted of getting together every few weeks to jump in bed and, on occasion, having Sked pull her out of some deadly situation of her own making. The Chinese jail had been the latest of an ever-escalating series of serious issues he’d solved for her.

  For his own part, Sked wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on a crossword for all the oil in Saudi Arabia.

  “What doesn’t?” Akane asked when it became clear he wasn’t going to volunteer anything else.

  “None of it. This island was supposed to be empty when the Buddha recommended it. Suddenly, it seems to have become the epicenter for everything. Armed cannibals and dinosaurs and monsters and the Triads. A yachtful of morons with a billionaire patron. Yes, I know the Triads supposedly followed us to get here, but come on, there’s no way they could have tracked our escape all the way to Andaman without help. More than one person had to talk.”

  “The Triads can make a stone talk.”

  “Yeah… but the Triads weren’t the ones at the back end of that trail. That was the Chinese government.”

  Akane shrugged. “The Triads are probably a lot closer related to the government than anyone imagines. At the very least, they have people who talk to them.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, but even if it’s true, why would the Chinese put them on our trail? Why not come after us themselves? I’m convinced someone else sent the Triad guys here… and we weren’t killed because we got lucky.”

  “The Buddha?”

  “Maybe. But the Buddha sent us here… and he had to have known this place was about to get crowded. That’s the kind of thing he knows.”

  “So you think he wanted us to die?”

  “I thought about that… but no. He could have had the crew of the fishing boat chop us into bait if that’s what he wanted.” Sked looked out into the sea. At least there was no sign of ship-eating monsters out there. “No. He wanted us here for some reason. He doesn’t want us dead.”

  “Why?”

  “I suspect there’s something here he doesn’t like, and everything that’s happened since is his way of making life difficult for whatever that is.”

  “I don’t think the Buddha would be too bothered by a second-rate beach resort and a bunch of cannibals.”

  “No. He wouldn’t be. And he wouldn’t send us out after it either. Hackers and Triad thugs would make very little difference to a lost tribe.” He paused. “There’s something else here.”

  Akane laughed. “More stuff? You were just saying how ridiculously complicated this mess already is and now you postulate there’s something else on the island? Are you even listening to yourself?”

  Sked sighed. “You might be right. But I want to look at whatever is in those trees behind the resort. You coming?”

  “What, now?”

  “I’m too nervous to do a crossword.”

  “Wuss.”

  But she got up and they headed towards the cabin to get more suitable shoes. The Colonel crossed their path as they moved up the beach. “Going somewhere?”

  “Into the jungle behind the cabins.”

  That earned them a raised eyebrow. “And why, may I ask?”

  “We like to have sex outdoors and we’d rather not have an audience,” Akane said. “Now, if you don’t mind. We’ll be back in an hour. Two if my husband here can last that long.”

  The agreement was that the Colonel would help keep the Triad men to their word while, at the same time keeping Sked and Akane from escaping the island. So the man wasn’t just being nosy… but Sked still had to snicker at the fact that anyone would dare to speak to the bluff Englishman that way.

  The Colonel turned red and said, “All right, carry on, then. But if you’re not back for lunch, I’ll let them go in after you.”

  “Tell them to bring cameras,” Akane said and walked on, leaving the former special forces soldier open-mouthed behind her.

  Sked stifled his laughter and followed her.

  The woods were a dense tangle directly behind the cabins, so they walked along the resort’s forest paths.

  “Did you notice something?” Sked said. “The forest is much denser towards the middle of the empty area than towards the edges. It’s almost as if they planted more undergrowth here than natural.”

  It was true. To their right, the trees along the path were widely-spaced and one could easily walk into the woods. On their left were vines, creepers and all sorts of ground vegetation that would require a machete.

  “So let’s go the way the forest doesn’t want us to.”

  They pushed into the weeds on the left and made it a few yards. “We’ll need to go get better equipment,” Sked panted.

  “No. Wait a second,” Akane replied. “I think…” She pushed on a particularly thick clump of leaves which gave way to reveal a much more sparsely vegetated area that resembled the other side of the path. “How much do you want to wager that someone put that tangle in to stop curious people from walking in?”

  “No bet,” Sked replied. “I’m already convinced.”

  He was even more convinced when they found a well-maintained path heading deeper into the jungle.

  “Not subtle,” Akane observed.

  “Not in the least. And neither is the surveillance.” He nodded towards a tree. About halfway up the trunk someone had bolted a security camera. Wires ran down the bole and into a green tube buried underground so only one extreme was visible.

  “We should probably go back,” Akane said.

  “No. Let’s pretend to be what we’re supposed to be. Kiss me.”

  They held the clinch for a few moments and then walked along the path hand-in-hand, superficially just two lovers out for a stroll.

  “You think anyone will buy this?” Akane asked.

  “Just keep selling it.”

  They made excellent time along the path. Not having to push through the underbrush made progress effortless. Within minutes, the path came up to a concrete structure seven or eight meters wide with a large door built into it. It was an old structure, stained with damp and with moss growing over it in places. The door, four meters wide and nearly three tall, looked like it could withstand a missile strike. Sked would have pegged it for something left over from WWII except for one thing: it had a keypad lock with the Bharat Electronics logo emblazoned on it.

  “Keep walking, pretend we’re not interested,” he said with a smile, and goosed her just as they passed the next camera.

  “You’re overselling,” Akane replied with a smile that said he was an utter moron.

  He knew this was the critical juncture. Whoever was inside the structure would look askance at anyone investigating, and if they believed Akane and Sked had ulterior motives for being where they were, they could come out and grab them with no witnesses. But they’d most likely leave them alone: it was much smarter to ignore people who wouldn’t care or even understand what they were looking at than to create questions by kidnapping tourists.

  Most of the resort’s inhabitants, after all, would just shrug off the structure as some old storage unit.

  They wouldn’t know that you didn’t put a keypad lock like that one on a random storage unit.

  They continued along the path without slowing or speeding up until they reached the other end, kissed a few times for effect and then pushed through the undergrowth to get back into the familiar resort forest.

  “You’ve established that there is something strange and secret hidden back there. My question is what are we going to do about it? Are we going to grab our guns and try to invade?”

  “What? No. Why would we do that? We don’t know what’s in there.”

  Akane raised an eyebrow. “W
e know the Buddha’s interested. Shouldn’t that be enough?”

  “Not necessarily. Knowing the Buddha, it might be a warehouse full of old personnel records, stuff he can mine for incriminating evidence about people he wants to blackmail,” Sked replied.

  “But then why has everyone converged on this island? The only reason we even went looking for something is that you felt there was too much going on for it to be explained away.”

  Sked sighed. “I hate it when you use my own words against me. All right. So what if there’s an Indian Army data center down there? You want to storm it with the guns we took from those Triad guys? Hell, we barely have any bullets left. For all we know, they could have a battalion hidden in there.”

  “Then what now?”

  “I need to think.”

  “All right,” Akane said. “Then I’m going to get something to eat and take a nap. See you.”

  She walked off, leaving him open-mouthed. They were stuck on this island, surrounded by enemies and monsters, but he had no doubt that she would eat and take her nap without being troubled in the least.

  He hurried after her. Maybe she was right.

  ***

  As it transpired, they didn’t take a nap. Akane grabbed him as they went in the door of the cabin and kissed him deeply. A couple of hours later, they heard something from outside.

  “What the hell?” Akane said.

  “Gunshot,” Sked replied.

  “I thought we’d taken their guns?” The Colonel, fortunately, had let them keep their weapons after they’d explained the situation.

  “Only the Triads’. I bet the Colonel has one, probably something obnoxious like a Desert Eagle. He probably decided to try to take out Godzilla with a handgun.”

  They dressed quickly and blinked as they came into the light.

  To their surprise, the Colonel hurried past their door just as they emerged, lacking in handguns of any description. He was heading towards the northern border of the resort. He stopped when he saw them standing there, just as surprised to encounter them as they were to see him.