Lost Island Rampage

by Gustavo Bondoni

  “Yeah, right,” Sked replied.

  “I mean it. I’ve gotten used to you… so I’d hate to see your head get crushed.”

  Sked rose gingerly to his feet. He would have the mother of all Charlie horses tomorrow. He probably wouldn’t be able to sit for days. “So what are you waiting for? Why haven’t you gone after her?”

  “I need your help.” She pointed to the staircase leading to the balcony above them. “We need to box her in, and there’s another staircase just like this one on the other side. Can you go up that one, and make sure she doesn’t try anything ambitious?”

  Sked nodded and limped around the metal walls of the bridge tower. He climbed the stairs, each step an exercise in agony. About halfway up, he heard two shots in quick succession from the opposite balcony. Nevertheless, he forced himself to hurry, though he would probably be late to the action. The smart money was on Akane having carried out the hit with two shots to the head before he even arrived, but he still wanted to get there quickly in case their quarry had any tricks up her sleeve and Akane was in trouble.

  He needn’t have worried. Akane stood with her gun poised over a female form. Sked recognized the woman from the room.

  But Sabrina wasn’t dead; she was crawling, using her elbows to try to pull herself away from Akane. The woman’s legs dragged behind, leaving a trail of blood along the metal deck. The back of one thigh sported a large exit wound, blood just now staining the pink flesh.

  “You didn’t kill her?”

  Akane shook her head.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I decided I don’t like her,” Akane replied. She showed no emotion, but her blank expression chilled Sked’s blood more than a rictus of hate would ever have managed. That woman was definitely going to die, but when Akane took things personally… it might take the woman a long time to do so.

  Of course, if she actually was responsible for putting the little dinosaurs on the island, she was a mass murderer and, though he wouldn’t necessarily condone whatever Akane might be planning for her, he really couldn’t argue either.

  Sked looked away just in time to see Cora striding along the lower deck. Even though her gun was out of its holster, she walked like she owned the place. He hissed at her and she pointed the gun at him.

  Recognizing Sked, Cora lowered the weapon and he motioned her to come up.

  “What the..?” Cora said when she saw Sabrina crawling along, not making a noise, with a grinning Akane standing over her, occasionally kicking her in the ribs. “That woman needs a doctor.”

  Akane looked up. “You don’t say,” she said, before turning her attention back to Sabrina.

  Sked took Cora’s arm and pulled her around the corner. Cora came reluctantly, but she came… which was the only reason he managed to budge her.

  “There had better be a really good explanation for what I just saw,” Cora fumed. “I’ve just about had enough of that girl. What the hell does she think she is? Judge, jury and executioner? I know she had a rough time of it. That sucks. But at some point, it’s just got to stop.”

  Sked let the big Marine finish, then tried to keep his voice level. “That woman created the monsters.”

  “What?”

  “She took lizard DNA or something and built the dinosaurs. The little ones and the big one that munched your lifeboat. Unless I’m mistaken, that’s the one that’s trying to board the ship over there.”

  Cora looked dumbly out at the enormous creature attempting to capsize the Stern Liberia. “She did that?”

  “Yeah. And she’s the one watching the camera feed from the little monsters eating everyone.”

  “I didn’t see any cameras.”

  “They’re small, on collars. We just got a chance to study a couple of the things in a place where we didn’t have to run from them… and they were both wired for video.”

  “Are they like robots? Was she controlling them?”

  Sked thought about it, but then shook his head. “I doubt it. No one I’ve ever heard of is that far advanced in integrating digital components and nervous systems. And I’m in a business where you’d hear the whispers if someone was working.”

  “So she just dumped them on the beach and let them eat whatever they found?”

  “Yup. And she was probably the one who opened the doors to all the cages on this boat. The security guys don’t seem thrilled to be overrun with dinosaurs.” He held her eyes for a couple of beats. “Akane might be a bit of an extremist, but I’ve never seen her get medieval on anyone who doesn’t deserve it. She lives and lets live, but she’s got a serious anger about what this woman did.”

  “And what’s she going to do with her now?” Cora inquired. “Live and let live?”

  “Not likely. This woman is going to get a slug in the back of the head. But Akane’s in no hurry.”

  “Over my dead body.”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that,” Sked said quietly. “She is seriously against anyone interfering in her plans.”

  “Is she American?”

  “Who, Akane?”

  “No. I couldn’t care less about Akane. I hope I never see her again in my life. I mean this scientist woman. If she’s American, I’m taking her back with me when we get out of here, and I’m turning her in to the authorities to stand trial.”

  “People like her don’t stand trial. They disappear into the Pentagon to keep developing their weapons.”

  “I don’t care.”

  Sked sighed. “We need to work together to get out of here. How’s this: don’t say anything about this until the situation shakes out. We’ll decide once we’re safe.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Be reasonable,” Sked pleaded.

  “Reasonable? I don’t want to be an accessory to a sadistic torturer who plans to murder her victim.”

  “If we kill each other, it’s moot.”

  “If I shoot her in the back right now, it’s solved,” Cora retorted.

  “I won’t let you do that,” Sked said.

  “You think you can stop me?”

  “You think you’ll survive if you kill me? Even if Akane doesn’t shoot you before I hit the ground? We need to work together.”

  “Fuck,” Cora said. “All right. But I have two conditions.” She held up her hand and counted on her fingers. “The first is that we get that woman to the doctor right now. She’ll bleed to death otherwise.”

  “I suppose I can talk her into that. What’s the second?”

  “If it looks like your psycho girl is about to shoot her, the agreement is cancelled.”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  “That’s what it takes.”

  Sked explained it to Akane, who agreed readily enough to make him suspicious.

  But in this situation, a yes was a yes, and he wasn’t going to question it too closely.

  Moments later, he and Cora had a shoulder under each of Sabrina’s arms and they assisted the woman to the infirmary. Though she must have been in excruciating pain, she never made a sound.

  Sked, on the other hand, complained of his bruised butt all the way. It was that or tell the two crazy women to shoot each other and leave him alone.

  Chapter 22

  “Something’s not right.” Cora felt the floor shifting under her feet. By now they’d become used to the back and forth swaying and sudden shaking of the Stern Liberia as one monster attempted to capsize it while another seemed intent on beating its brains out against the hull.

  But this was something different. The ship was heeling. Seriously leaning.

  She stepped out of the infirmary to try to see if she could find out what was happening. She wasn’t concerned about running into anyone: the crew hadn’t paid them any attention, and the security people who’d originally locked them up only spoke to them once, when they dropped off a severely injured man that the doctor had taken one look at, shaken his head and shot full of painkillers. He’d stopped breathing a few minutes later.<
br />
  Everyone seemed much too busy to care who they were or what they were doing on board. The little dinosaurs were spreading all over the ship from the container deck. An occasional terrified scream told Cora when someone encountered one.

  One of the sailors rushed past. Actually, he tried to rush past, and Cora recognized the man she’d press-ganged earlier.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “You again?” He didn’t seem thrilled to see her again.

  “Yeah. Sorry about before.”

  “No problem, I guess. How’s your friend?”

  Cora shrugged. “Still unconscious. Doc says he really can’t do anything more with what we’ve got here. And now he’s got another patient.”

  “Sorry to hear that.” He seemed in a hurry to get on with whatever he was doing, but obviously didn’t want her to pull her gun on him again. Furtive but obvious glances towards her gun in its holster gave the man’s fears away.

  “Look, I don’t want to detain you, but I need to know what’s happening. Are we taking on water?”

  “Oh, yeah. Lots and lots of water. Captain says we need to find a spot to beach.”

  Cora groaned. The only place she could think of was the fucking island. Was there no way to escape the cursed place?

  The man fidgeted. “Can I go?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  She returned to the infirmary. Doc had finished pulling the bullets out of the woman’s legs and bandaged her up. He’d probably done some stitching, too, but Cora hadn’t stayed to watch. She hated watching medics at work.

  They’d put the cook off to one side. She had no idea what the doc had done. The dude was still out, still pale, and breathing only a little better than before. The bunny was in the corner with him, holding his hand and sobbing. For a woman who’d had her sights on landing a rich executive just a few days ago, she’d certainly fallen hard for that tough little Filipino. It looked bad for the guy, though. Cora didn’t need to see Mary crying to know that much. She’d been around enough death to know what it looked like when it was close.

  “Listen up,” she announced. “The ship’s taking on water. Not sure how long we have, but the Captain thinks it’s sinking.”

  To her surprise, the scientist woman, sitting on the bed, smiled. “Kali,” the woman said.

  Cora ignored her and continued. “Apparently, the crew wants to beach on the island. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m in no hurry to go back there. I propose we steal a lifeboat and go back to our original plan of rowing to Andaman. It’s the perfect time to do it: everyone’s too busy fighting monsters to pay any attention to us.”

  A sudden silence descended on the room as everyone’s eyes turned to Mary and the cook.

  “We can’t move him,” the doctor said quietly.

  Mary met their collective gaze. “I’m staying with him.”

  “This ship is going back to the island.”

  “I understand that. I’m not stupid. I’ll take my chances. He saved me several times, and I owe him this much.” She wiped away a tear. “But you should definitely go. I’ll lock the door behind you. The little monsters don’t use doors.”

  Cora almost called the whole thing off. It was as good as sentencing them both to death, which would mean that the only person she’d managed to save from the yacht was Lai. If they’d made her choose, he was the one she would have taken… but knowing how many people she’d failed completely was a terrible feeling. Still, better to save one than to doom them all.

  “All right. Are you with us?”

  Everyone nodded, even the doctor, which surprised Cora. The cook must really have been beyond help for that stubborn bastard to abandon him.

  “Good. Let’s go.”

  Sked and Lai stood, and Akane grabbed the scientist by the hair, pulling her off the bed.

  “Leave her,” Cora said.

  “Make me,” Akane replied. She pulled the stumbling woman along, apparently unconcerned about whether the violent motion would burst the newly sewn stitches and cause her to bleed out. Cora had never been so close to shooting someone in the back as she was at that moment. Akane just made her grind her teeth.

  Ania, ghostlike as always, paused before joining them. Then, in a rush of motion, she hugged Mary hard. “Thank you,” Ania said.

  Then she followed the others out the door.

  Lai and Sked nodded towards Mary before leaving Cora alone with the English girl. She wanted to beg her to reconsider, to leave the guy behind; he was dead anyway. But sometimes a person knew what they had to do. Cora nodded her respect and stepped out. “Don’t forget to lock up behind us,” she called over her shoulder. “Maybe block the door, too.” The infirmary had one of the thick doors, which closed with a solid clang as Cora pulled.

  She joined the group on deck.

  “Any suggestions?” she asked Sked. At this point, he was the only one she really trusted.

  “There’s a lifeboat on each side of the container deck,” he said.

  “Which is stupid,” Lai added. “That’s the place where they’re most likely to get damaged when the ship gets loaded and unloaded. There should be more of them aft of us, near the crew quarters.”

  “We don’t know that,” Sked said. “We should go for the sure thing.”

  Lai shrugged. “Lead the way.”

  Cora reflected on how little of the man who’d run his company with an iron fist seemed to remain. Whatever this experience meant to Lai, it certainly seemed to have eroded his sense of self-assuredness. Besides the fact that he simply gave up and let Sked do what he wanted, her boss seemed to have aged a decade in a handful of days. His shoulders stooped, his formerly flashing eyes lifeless.

  She led them forward. The first few yards were fine, but when they reached the front of the bridge, enabling them to look over the container area, everyone stopped dead.

  The monster that had sunk the first lifeboat was halfway on the ship. A crushed container lay beside it.

  “That’s huge,” Ania said, her eyes wide. She turned to Cora. “I’m sorry I doubted you.”

  Cora stared at it wordlessly for a couple of moments. Then she turned back to the woman. “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t have believed myself either.”

  The monster towered above the container, looking like an old Godzilla film with a guy in a rubber suit tearing through a model of Tokyo. The sense of unreality was heightened by the security team firing automatic weapons at it in a display of futile bravura. When the monster snapped its jaws around the nearest security guy, it didn’t feel like a real life of hopes and dreams and plans being snuffed out, but more like being part of the audience in a theater.

  Beside her, Sked pointed. “Over there. Right across from the monster. One of the lifeboats.”

  “It’s not a monster,” the scientist said. She didn’t look good. Loss of blood had her pale and drawn, and the painkillers the doctor had given her slurred her words. That guy didn’t mess around. “’s my baby.”

  “Shut up, bitch,” Akane said, pulling the woman toward the staircase leading down.

  They made their way along the railing on the opposite side of the ship from the monster. Cora looked down to see that the sea seemed closer than it had been last time.

  A container, knocked from one of the piles by the incessant banging, blocked their path, half on the ship, half cantilevered over the ocean. Sked stopped in front of it and leaned over the inner railing, the one that separated the walkway from the container deck itself.

  “We can climb down onto those containers there and then climb back onto the top level once we pass the obstacle,” he said.

  “That looks dangerous,” the doctor observed.

  Cora laughed. “Like we have a choice now. Basically, even going into one of the cabins and hiding under a bunk is suicidal. The rest is just a question of degrees.”

  They began to climb onto the big metal boxes, the edges of which were only about a yard below them. The collapse of the pile of containe
rs had blocked the way but also flattened the railing for ten yards on either side, making it easier to go over the edge to clamber onto the teetering steel mountains.

  They made it across without incident, Sked and the doctor manhandling the wounded scientist. Cora was about to tell them to leave the woman behind. She was slowing them down… but Cora was convinced that, if forced to leave her prisoner behind, Akane would shoot her before letting her go. So she said nothing as they hailed their bleeding charge over the gaps. The woman’s stoic refusal to admit pain was beginning to break down. She moaned softly as they jostled her.

  The deck widened on the other side of the downed container and they found themselves surrounded by men.

  Cora was immediately alert. These guys weren’t sailors. Their dress, their bearing, even the fact that they were all a bit overfed spoke against that. Worse, they all had American accents, which meant they were probably all from ZooDef.

  They paid no attention to Cora, but appeared intent on maneuvering a machine that resembled a giant forklift. The thing was as long as a U-Haul truck and its lifting tines were as long as the rest of it. She realized it must be designed for the ability to lift entire containers.

  Cables above it, rigged to a crane, bore witness to how the men had brought it there.

  No one seemed to care that they were present so Cora was about to lead the group around the men at work when the ship shook again.

  She nearly fell into the gap between the main deck and the container area. Akane landed on her ass, and the scientist she’d been holding up rolled across the floor and gave herself another nasty knock. The container which had been tottering on the edge fell over with a huge splash. Someone was going to be out a few dozen air conditioning units.

  As they picked themselves up, checked for new bruises and brushed off their clothes, the doctor cocked his head. “What’s that?”

  They rushed to the side of the ship and looked over.

  A head the size of a bus looked up at them. The monster held onto the Stern Liberia with a tiny clawed fin.

  “You’re hurt!” Sabrina said in the kind of tones you’d normally reserve for a cute puppy.