***
Sked and Akane had been teamed up, of course. No one would have dreamed of trying to separate them.
They did their dusk patrol along the perimeter fence and checked in just as if they had nothing unusual planned.
The second lap, in the darkness, was when they would make their move.
Akane had brought a set of bolt cutters from one of the maintenance sheds and they went to work on the fence just where the beach met the water. It was the perfect spot, partly because the lights were weaker there than elsewhere, but mainly because the patrols behind them would focus on the fence in the forest, not here. No one expected the natives to attack from the beach.
So the hole they were quickly cutting in the fence might go unnoticed until the following morning.
“I feel kinda bad weakening their defenses this way,” Sked said.
“See? That’s the kind of thing that never would have occurred to you before. You’re getting soft on me.”
It was precisely the same argument she’d used to convince him of going along with her plan. Whether he truly was someone else overlaid on the brain of the man she’d once known, or whether he was actually just going crazy, one thing was certain: his feelings for Akane were too powerful to ignore. He would do anything for her… and his memories indicated he’d done many of them already. Up to and including springing her from a secret Chinese detention facility.
So just double-crossing a bunch of people he didn’t know wasn’t a huge leap.
As they cut into the wire, he imagined alarms lighting up a panel in that bunker they’d seen in the forest and camouflaged, automated guns taking a bead on his back.
But nothing happened and, working quickly, they soon had an opening in the fence large enough for them to squeeze through.
They did so and ran up the beach, the pistols they’d taken from the hapless Triad would-be murderers drawn and cocked.
There. The lumpy shape of the Zodiac was exactly where the men had said it was, easily visible in the bright moonlight. They redoubled their speed.
And stopped dead when they arrived. The islanders had been there already. The inflatable boat was cut and pierced with arrows and the contents of the packs were scattered on the sand.
“Dammit,” Sked said. “We can’t use this.”
“You don’t say.”
“I should have…” he paused and cocked his head. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen.” He remained silent for a moment.
“Oh, shit,” Akane said. “Someone’s screaming. Back where we came from.”
“Do you think someone got in through our cut?”
“They would have had to find it in the dark.”
“We need to go help,” Sked said. “Are you coming?”
“I normally don’t run towards the screaming,” Akane said, “but I don’t think I have much choice this time. Without this boat, we’re better off all together.”
They headed back towards the resort, at full tilt, scratching themselves on the cut fencing. Even though they were in a huge hurry, however, Sked took the time to illuminate the ground beneath them.
“I only see our prints. Whatever is going on back there isn’t our fault,” he informed Akane.
She either didn’t hear him or didn’t care, and they raced towards the cluster of cabins along the shore. Sked saw movement around the biggest building, the glorified hut where the hotel lobby functioned. His heart sank. That was where they’d left the old people and the women who didn’t feel they wanted to be part of the patrol rotation.
They were pretty much helpless; and if the natives had reached them, they were pretty much dead. The whole plan revolved around not letting anyone get through the perimeter or at least getting early warning if they did.
Though he couldn’t understand how, the plan had failed.
The lobby’s main window was broken, so Sked simply stepped through. The lights were only half-on and the place was pandemonium.
People seemed to be crawling through the shadows at high speed. Either that or they were crouched near the ground. Was that how the natives hunted? It hadn’t given him that impression from the description of the attack on the lifeboat survivors.
Suddenly, one of the forms came at him out of the dim interior and jumped at his head.
Sked reacted without thinking. He punched at his assailant with his right hand and, using their own motion against them, launched the figure behind him. Only later did he realize the thing was much too light to be an islander.
“Akane, get back!” he shouted as he began to retreat. “It’s the dinosaurs!”
Akane still wasn’t listening to him. She flashed past without slowing and rushed to a table where the source of the screaming appeared to be standing. Sked was shocked to realize that the Colonel’s wife was up there, clobbering any of the little dinosaurs who got too close with a chair. Even though she looked quite intimidating in her elevated position, it was obvious that she wouldn’t last much longer: there were just too many of them.
Sure of their kill, the creatures had grown overconfident and neglected to watch their backs. With a scream, Akane was among them, kicks and a couple of shots dealing with four of the monsters and opening a path to the old woman.
The Colonel’s wife grabbed Akane’s proffered hand and, pausing only long enough to throw her chair at the dinosaurs on the other side with a shout of “Eff you, you buggers!” she jumped down. The two hurried towards Sked.
Now that they’d lost the element of surprise, Sked thought the little dinosaurs would mob them, but now that the woman was down from the table, the creatures seemed uninterested in giving chase. Instead, they nosed at stuff on the floor.
The trio retreated into the floodlit sand in front of the wrecked lobby, just in time to see Cora arrive, gun drawn.
“What the hell is going on here?” the former Marine asked.
“Dinosaurs,” Sked said, nodding towards the broken glass. “In there.”
“Where is everyone?”
It was the Colonel’s wife who replied. “I think they’re also in there. Dead. One or two might have gotten out in the commotion, but I can’t be sure. The ones I saw went down.”
And Sked understood why the monsters hadn’t come for them. Why go after enemies that had shown themselves capable of self-defense when you could gorge on the corpses of those who weren’t. That was what they were nosing on the floor for: easy food.
“Ugh,” he said.
“You mean this isn’t the islanders?” Cora asked. She blanched. “If everyone heard the screams, they’re probably all coming this way… and no one is on the fence.”
“So what?” Akane interjected. “We’ve already lost the people we were supposed to be defending. What difference does it make where we set our new perimeter?”
“Damn,” Cora said. “I wish that weren’t true.” She seemed to deflate, which Sked found surprising. This woman had given him the impression that she would chew through barbed wire just for something to do on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Just then, the Colonel barged in, accompanied by one of the sailors and another man, red and panting. Sked recognized him as having been paired with Cora. As the Colonel hugged his wife and received her report, the man asked, desperate, where his own wife was.
Sked just shook her head and pointed to the carnage in the lobby. While they were talking, something must have shorted out inside, because a small fire was burning. Even that hadn’t scared the dinosaurs into abandoning the grisly work of gorging themselves. They could be seen clearly.
The man cried “Talia,” and rushed towards the broken window.
Sked had been waiting for that, and tackled him before he went three steps. The other man might have been desperate, but Sked was a couple of decades younger and well trained. He pinned him without effort.
“If you die, she’ll still be dead,” he said.
“No.” The man struggled, trying to
free himself.
“Yes. Listen to me. You need to calm down.” Then, a few seconds later, after the man had stopped struggling: “Can I trust you to get up?”
The man nodded, desperation in his eyes.
“Good.” Sked released him, hoping the other man wouldn’t do anything stupid, but determined not to stop him again. If he wanted to become monster food, that was his own problem.
“We need to get out of here,” Cora said. “I count fifteen of those things. We might shoot every bullet we have trying to take them out.”
“So let’s take them out,” the sailor said.
“No. I’d rather use them on the natives and let the animals take care of themselves. The natives are the real danger.”
The sailor glanced in the direction of the hellscape in the lobby. He didn’t look convinced.
Cora led them to the nearest cabin, and they stood behind it, intercepting the other groups as they arrived. Unfortunately, the Triad guys were next. Cora relaxed visibly when Lai showed up with the doctor.
The last to reach them were Mary and the cook, panting and red.
“The islanders are coming,” she said. They’re climbing the fence about two hundred meters from the shore, on the north side.”
Sked swore, but he knew what he had to do.
“All right,” Sked said. “I know where we need to go. Follow me.”
“What about the rest of our people?” the big Marine asked.
“I can’t help them. I’m going to save myself and anyone else who wants to come. They’ll be here any second. And the monsters are already here. For all we know, they killed everyone else.”
“Two more minutes. That should give survivors time to reach us.”
“All right. I need to go get something in my room.” He ran in that direction.
“What kind of something?” Akane said when they reached their door. “Are we ditching these bozos?”
“Not yet. We may need either muscle or cannon fodder where we’re going.”
“Now you’re talking… but you didn’t answer my question.”
“I’m getting my equipment. We’ll need to bust a lock.”
“You have equipment here and you didn’t tell me?”
“It didn’t seem important,” he said. “Besides, we were supposed to be lying low.”
The venom in her look expressed her opinion of that, eloquently. But she knew he had cause to distrust her. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d run on him after liberating a crapton of expensive electronics from his possession.
He chuckled. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing every once in a while would do her good. Build some character.
“Got it. Let’s go.”
Chapter 12
The woods were different at night, and it wasn’t just the darkness. Sked had expected darkness. In fact, if the darkness had been complete, it would have been easier to navigate using flashlights and cell phones.
What made it confusing was the way the illumination from the perimeter floodlights worked its way between the trees and cast sharply defined shadows. Since the main features of everything they could see were redefined by whether the light from the fence was making it through, it became truly difficult to understand what you were looking at.
Fortunately, the deeper they went into the undergrowth, the less light arrived, but even in the heart of the triangular woods behind the resort, one was occasionally surprised by a sharp beam and stumbled into the obstacle behind it, unseen in the pitch darkness of the shadows.
It nearly became a moot point, however, because Sked couldn’t find the gap where he and Akane had pushed off the path and into the woods. The undergrowth to their left appeared to be an unbroken wall, either pitch black or bathed in actinic light.
“You need to hurry,” Cora said.
“I’m trying,” he replied. But the bushes seemed to have grown back to their original position, and he was not in the least tempted to push through in the dark.
“Try harder,” the Marine replied.
A tiny dent in the vegetation suggested a way in, and he pointed. “This way, I think.”
“Good.” Cora pushed past him and began to move the branches aside. Sked followed, with Akane and Lai just behind him. If things were going according to plan, the Colonel and the doctor would bring up the rear of their little procession, fifteen people strong.
Fifteen people left. How many had there been originally? Sked wondered. Forty? Fifty? Many more if you counted all the people on Lai’s yacht. So around fifty dead already, and the night was still very young.
They had three guns between them. Cora had one, the Colonel had the one Sked had taken from the Triads, and Akane had refused to give hers up. Against what? Dozens of armed islanders who knew the terrain better than they ever could, plus a herd of small but vicious dinosaurs that could probably hunt by scent just as well in the dark as they could at noon.
The odds definitely seemed stacked against them.
He hoped they could get into the bunker and close the door behind them, mainly so they could regroup in safety. If the people inside the bunker—he was certain there was something in there—were armed, then the game was pretty much over. They would be caught between the proverbial rock and the hard place, and would be ground to dust between them.
“Fuck,” Cora grunted. “You guys went through this crap? You must be a hell of a lot tougher than you look.”
The Marine was right. The undergrowth ahead of them was thicker than he remembered. They were probably forcing a new path through the wall of weeds… but by this point, Sked was fine with that. The clock in his head, honed to a fine point during mission after mission and against the firewalls of hundreds of sites, told him things were about to get too hot to handle, and that they needed to punch through now. He’d learned to trust that sixth sense with his life.
If they went back now, they were all dead.
So he let Cora blaze the trail and pushed aside any stubborn plants that sprang back after she passed. By the time the Colonel went through, the gap in the plants would be wide enough for a blind tracker to find by echolocation…
But he doubted the islanders would have any blind trackers with them, and the lighting would work against anyone working by sight. They might just have a chance.
Once past the wall of weeds, the paths were as he remembered them. Fortunately, the light was much better within than it had been outside. Unfortunately, that also meant it was darker.
But there was no real need to navigate. The path here led straight to their destination, so Sked passed the scratched and cursing Marine to take the lead and ran along the barely visible path for a couple of minutes until the hulking bunker came into view. This time, instead of bypassing the entrance, he headed up the path and knelt by the keypad, illuminating it with his phone.
“Dammit,” he whispered.
“What?” Akane said as she arrived.
“Industrial lock.”
“Commercial?”
“Yeah, but not one I can brute-force quickly.”
“If someone built this out in the boonies, maybe they hired a lazy contractor…”
“Default code?” he said with a smile.
“That’s what I was thinking, yeah.”
“Let me check the database.” He opened the laptop and pulled up a spreadsheet.
“What are you guys doing?” Cora said.
“Opening the door.”
“You brought explosives?” She sounded both surprised and impressed by the idea.
Sked rolled his eyes even though he was fairly certain that she wouldn’t be able to see it in the darkness. It was a question of principles, and he hoped no one would ever mistake him for the kind of grunt who blew up doors. Especially doors they would need to keep the bad guys out after the good guys were inside.
“We don’t blow doors up. We’re a little more sophisticated than that.”
“You can get this open?” she asked.
&n
bsp; “I can. The main question is whether it’s going to take ten seconds or an hour.”
One of the Triad guys, Harold, appeared and said: “I really hope it doesn’t take you an hour. Colonel says he heard something behind us.”
“It’ll take however long it takes,” Akane said. “Now let him work.”
But Sked was already working. “I have several Bharat listings here. Do you see a model number anywhere?”
“It’s a MaxCode 210,” Akane replied without even looking at it. He could hear the unspoken reproach in her voice, but said nothing. Akane was one of those people who believed everyone should also be a second-story man, no matter what else they might be doing in life. Which meant she expected everyone to know the model numbers on every industrial keypad in Asia on sight.
“Okay. Then type… let me see. Three hashtags, then four zeros, four nines and another hashtag.”
The steel door began to whine as it lifted.
“Bingo,” Akane said.
Cora jumped into action. “Get to cover!” she shouted.
“What for?”
“If there’s anyone in there, you all make a wonderful target, silhouetted against the light out here.”
“What light?”
“It’s much less dark outside than inside. Can’t you even tell that?”
“Hey, I work with stealth and surprise,” Sked said, raising his arms. “This shouldn’t have triggered any alarms.”
“But you said they have cameras. Unless they’re morons, they know we’re here.”
“All right.” They moved to one side and waited for the door to finish lifting. It took thirty seconds.
Cora popped her head around the corner and immediately pulled it back in.
“Did you see anything?” Sked said.
“Impossible. It’s dark as a billionaire’s heart in there.”
“I heard that,” Lai whispered from the shadows.
Cora chuckled and Sked wondered about the relationship they had. It wasn’t usual for a guy with that much money to treat his employees as equals, but that seemed to be how Cora saw herself.
Lost Island Rampage Page 12