The Island - Part 3

by Michael Stark

“Don’t push it. This is about the extent of my knowledge.”

  Unfortunately, his enthusiasm didn’t extend to the rest. Getting them moving proved difficult. Keeping them moving turned out to be almost impossible.

  We needed the right motivation. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t find it. Every morning, the new sense of determination that woke with the rising sun had dulled by midday and often died with the lunchtime newscast.

  I found it on the day The Fever claimed its one millionth victim. That number, of course, was an estimate, but a significant milestone as well. Not since the Black Plague had the world seen any disease attack with such ferocity, and never had it seen one strike so rapidly.

  Every afternoon, usually within an hour or two of lunch, I’d wander down the hill to the dock hoping to meet our newest resident. At least, that was the excuse I used. I mostly needed to escape the stupefying malaise that had swept over the station. For three days, Angel rocked gently opposite an odd shaped vessel that appeared as empty as she did.

  On the fourth day, a man sat at the end of the dock. His name happened to be Gabriel. While the events that unfolded carried their own sense of futility, the act of trying to save him prodded us into saving ourselves.

  Chapter XII - The Changeling

  The morning I finally met Gabriel, I woke to Jessie reaching out to shake my arm.

  “I’m awake,” I said and sat up. The sudden move startled her. She jumped back as if I’d tried to bite her and nearly fell over someone in the next cot over. I couldn’t tell who in the dark and my brain hadn’t sufficiently organized itself yet that I could remember.

  My voice came out rough and scratchy when I spoke.

  “Sorry, I seem to have two stages, out like a light or up and going. There’s not much in between.”

  “I’ll remember that next time you have watch,” she whispered. “You about gave me a heart attack.”

  “Who is my partner?”

  “Tyler,” she said in a low voice.

  “Let him sleep. I wanted two people on watch so one could keep the other awake. I’ll be okay. Besides, Elsie will be up soon.”

  “You sure?” she asked.

  I nodded and then realized she couldn’t see the motion.

  “Yes.”

  I spent the next hour bored and aching for coffee, but afraid the creaky old stove would wake the house. So I sat, in darkness too deep to do much more than stare at the gray rectangles that defined the windows. When Elsie emerged from the little room at the end of the hall a bit past five, pulled a sweater on, and headed for the kitchen, I was ready to thank God for her being an early riser. She made no excuse for the fact that she wanted coffee. Wood thumped and the firebox door grated. A few minutes later she had the old percolator pot sitting on the stove with a fire underneath.

  The kitchen had no door. In fact, nothing separated it from the main room except the bar. I imagine that long, low structure had seen a lot of food slid across to hungry men in the past. At that moment, I would have given up every morsel in exchange for coffee.

  Elsie knew that. She also knew I sat behind her, watching her watch the pot. I could have been a statue for all the attention she paid me. She fiddled with the damper on the firebox and adjusted the pot a time or two. Once she was satisfied the fire wouldn’t go out, she turned and headed back to her room. When she came back out twenty minutes later, the delicious aroma of coffee perking had me salivating. She poured two cups, handed me one, and pointed toward the door.

  “Let’s go smoke.”

  I grabbed the rifle and followed her. Neither of us felt much like talking for a while. The sky had begun to pale in the east, opening the same magical portal that opened every morning, when the fears of the night faded and the hopes of the day were born. We sat in the cool morning air, sipping from steaming cups, and burning through a couple of cigarettes before Elsie finally stood and stretched.

  “It’s time to get breakfast going and them youngsters up. I’ll let the food do the waking. People that age are always easier to get moving when their stomachs are growling.”

  She was right. By the time breakfast landed on the table nine more grumpy and disheveled people were there to greet it. Listening to the radio had already become a meal-time tradition with Elsie serving as the Mistress of Honors. She turned it on once everyone had settled down at the table. The airwaves brought more gloomy news. Millions of new infections had been reported overnight. An estimated two hundred thousand had died in the U.S. alone, with the number reaching a staggering one million worldwide. Governments around the world, including our own, had released new plans that appeared to be stopgap measures more than anything else. Even Christine noted that the steps seemed designed to quell the rising panic than to offer immediate relief.

  For the most part, the people around the table ate silently. The one item that raised heads and stilled the clink of forks came near the end of the segment when Christine noted that a small community in upstate New York had virtually disappeared overnight. Those close to the area had called in reporting hundreds of gunshots with one man saying the disturbance sounded like a battle and wondered if Canada had invaded during the night. State police arriving on the scene after sunrise reported ghastly details from what appeared to be the aftermath of home invasions and cannibalism on a massive scale.

  Detectives noted that the doors on many homes had been smashed in or ripped off their hinges. Streets, driveways and lawns were littered with bodies some partially eaten, others mangled. Details were sketchy but initial reports estimated that more than a hundred people had been killed, many in particularly gruesome ways. One officer noted that, in some cases, he had given up hunting for bodies and started trying to put pieces back together. He likened the carnage to a feeding frenzy, saying that the attacks appeared to have come while many were sleeping.

  More than twenty arrests had already been made, among them at least six fever victims. A statement released by the State Police said that several of those detained were violent and suffering from hallucinations with one woman describing the attackers as half man, half beast.

  I watched Daniel while the announcer read off the story. He sat picking at his food, a slice of fried ham and one of the precious few eggs we had left, his face as emotionless as ever. Just looking at him was unnerving enough to send goose bumps racing up my arms and down the back of my neck. That kid was not natural, in any sense of the word.

  After breakfast, I left most of the group with Elsie. Keith and Tyler, I took outside and talked about the old woman’s idea of shutters.

  “Build the shutters on the inside so we can open and close them without having to leave the station. We need some way of securing them as well. I don’t know what, maybe a bar we can slide across the back.”

  Tyler scratched at his head. “Where are we supposed to get the wood?”

  I hesitated, even though the answer had become increasingly obvious in the past couple of days. More than a dozen empty houses and sheds lay scattered across the field below. I had no idea how many laws we would be breaking by scavenging from them.

  “Use the sheds first,” I told them. “One of them probably has enough raw lumber to do the job. The station has a lot of windows. Try and work out a design that does the job with a minimum amount of damage to the other buildings.”

  With those two occupied, I headed down the sloping ground behind the station and made for the dock ostensibly to check on Angel, but, in reality, hoping to meet the man who had evaded me for three days.

  I found Angel bobbing peacefully. Across from her sat the same strange little boat that had occupied the dock on the three previous days. The vessel looked like the illegitimate child borne of the union between a tug boat and a sailboat. A high profile pilot house squatted near the center of the boat. In front of it, a short stub of a mast sprouted antennas instead of sails. Behind both stretched a wide section of deck covered by a Bimini top. Where Angel looked longer and leaner, the new boat had me humming a ba
stardized version of the teapot nursery rhyme.

  “I’m an ugly little boat, short and stout.

  I won’t tip over, so take me out!”

  Neither boat held my attention. The man at the end of the dock did. He sat in a fold-up lawn chair with a white five-gallon bucket beside him and a fishing pole in one hand. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and sat slumped in his chair as if sleeping.

  I hesitated on my end of the dock, cursing luck that would finally put him in sight, but force me to wake him. The internal debate didn’t last long. I figured if he came up angry, I could act as if I needed something off Angel. If he turned out pleasant, well, we’d have a talk.

  I shouldn’t have worried about waking him. Halfway out, with my sneakers barely making a sound on the old wooden planks, he straightened, perched the end of the fishing pole in a rod holder, and climbed to his feet with an odd, stiff-legged lurch.

  Elsie had been right about his age. When he turned, my mind sifted him right into the early fifties category. He stood about five eight and weighed maybe one seventy, making him solid without being heavy. The hat had seen better days. The edges drooped and the center looked like someone had shot a hole through it. The hair poking out from it carried more gray than brown. Aside from the Tom Sawyer headgear, he’d dressed in a sleeveless white t-shirt, charcoal gray cargo pants, and tennis shoes. The man looked hard, not the I’m-a-bad-ass kind of hard, but like a weathered old rock that had been standing at the edge of the ocean for a million years and would still be standing a million years later.

  The bucket sat off to the left of his chair and held the dark outline of a tail fin against the side. When I’d stepped close enough, I peered over the edge. A pair of Spanish mackerel lay curled inside. Both looked to be close to two feet long.

  “Damn,” I said. “That’s enough to make a man dig out his fishing pole.”

  Dark eyes stared back at me, the edges scored by tiny lines that grew deep when he squinted against the sun.

  “That’s close enough. You want to fish, go ahead,” he said in a dry tone. “I’ll give you the dock. I’ve been using Gotcha plugs. Tried the silver types first, but they seem to be hungry for the ones with the green body and red heads.”

  I studied him, confused by words that came out cross from a man who mostly looked tired.

  He motioned toward his boat. “I have some extras over there in a tackle box. It’s sitting out on the stern. But, I gotta tell ya, I haven’t had a hit in a while now.”

  I looked up. The sun blazed three hands high off the horizon, putting the time near ten a.m. “Yeah, it’s getting late for the morning feeding. Maybe I’ll come back down around sunset and give it a go.”

  He reeled the lure up to the end of the fishing rod and used it like a walking stick when he turned. His right leg swiveled stiff and straight at the end of his body like a rudder pointing him in the right direction. The pants had been split from the knee down. Two pieces of duct tape held the edges together. White beamed from the slit between them.

  “You’d do better up at the point,” he said. “You have to cast a long way here to get out to the moving water. Up there, you’d be right in it.”

  The man shifted his weight off his right leg. The move came across as stiff and painful. I squinted against the glare and studied his features for a moment, trying to figure out what was wrong. The brim of his hat cast deep shadows across his face. The eyes peering back at me appeared unnaturally bright, gleaming from sockets that looked as if they’d been drilled into his skull. When he turned, light glinted off sweat rolling down the side of his face, revealing cheeks that seemed gaunt and flushed.

  I didn’t have to take his pulse or check his blood pressure to be certain. The man was sick.

  “Name’s Gabriel,” he said as he clasped both hands around the stock of the fishing rod and used it to prop himself upright. The way he held it reminded me of a TV show I watched as a kid. Every day at four o’clock, right after school, I tuned in to reruns of Daniel Boone. I must have seen Fess Parker lean on his Kentucky long rife a thousand times.

  The brain works in weird ways. I stood two feet in front him, knowing that any sign of sickness should have sent me scrambling backwards with the theme song to that old show running through my head.

  Gabriel gave me an odd look. “You alright?”

  My mind shifted gears back to the present. “Yeah, sorry, I went off on a mind walk.”

  I did step back then, trying not to be obvious about it.

  “To a mighty oak tree?” he asked with a frown. “That’s some walk. It sounds more like a plane trip.”

  I winced. Two lines had played through my head. The man had just nailed the last one. I hadn’t realized I was half humming half whispering the words until then.

  He shook his head as if to clear away the fog.

  “I ran into some of your folks a few days ago. A sharp eyed old woman come down, talked a while, and then told me that a man my age should know better than to sit out in the sun all day with no sunscreen.”

  “That would be Elsie. Her opinion is not something she’s hesitant to share.”

  He made a wry face.

  “I noticed. She also told me I should pack up my things and come up to the station. In fact, she seemed about determined that I do so and even got a little high-handed with me. There was a minute there I thought she might try and throw me over her shoulder and carry me up there herself.”

  I said nothing for a long moment, trying to decide how to respond. Discussing toothy little imps that liked to feed on entrails might be pertinent, but might also send him scurrying right back out of the bay on his odd little boat. At the same time, I couldn’t think of an excuse for Elsie’s behavior.

  “Man’s tongue goes out on him, there’s a good chance he don’t want to talk about something,” Gabriel said slowly. “So tell me, are you all cannibals? A cabal of witches? Or is she just used to getting her way?”

  He offered a tight smile.

  “Or have you all seen some odd things?”

  It didn’t look like I had to worry about him running off in his strange little boat.

  “We’ve seen some odd things.”

  He lowered his hand to about two feet off the dock, wincing at the effort.

  “Little demon things about this tall?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I shot one. It was eating on a kid who drowned the day before. I take it you’ve seen them too.”

  “Then we need to talk, don’t we?”

  “I guess we do,” I told him.

  At dusk on the night I’d been blasting away in Angel’s stern, a long, low cloud of what he thought were bats came streaming across the evening sky. He had been anchored in the lee of the island to ride out the storms and had just come out on deck when he saw them. They sailed in from the mainland like a massive river drawn across the heavens in thousands of black dots. Even at a distance, they’d seemed strange. As they grew closer, he heard them, a chorus of rough, whispering voices chanting something he couldn’t understand.

  “That’s when I hit the door and locked up the pilot house,” he said. “I locked up the main hatch, the portholes, them big windows on top. I even shut down the outside air vents.”

  Whether they saw him, heard him, or smelled him, he never knew. He’d climbed back up in the pilot house to watch the eerie trail of somethings swirl overhead when he heard the scratching.

  “I turned and nearly crapped my pants. One of them little fuckers was two inches from my back, scratching on the window with its little hooked claws.”

  According to the older man, the creatures had swarmed his boat, so many that he lost sight of the deck. He described the view outside the pilot house window as one that looked like a leathery and winged form of kudzu, a shapeless rounded mass of lizard-like bodies, wide mouths, and all of them trying to get inside.

  He’d fled below and locked the main hatch to the cabin behind him. For thirty minutes, they’d crawled, scratched and eeked
their way across the decks like ship rats run wild. At times he heard words. They wanted to play. One wanted to grow.

  When I frowned at him, he shrugged. “I don’t know what it meant. It just kept saying it over and over.”

  Then as suddenly as they appeared, they were gone, arcing off in the night as thousands of wings beat at the air. He couldn’t see them, but he could tell by the sound they were heading south. He had stayed below, locked away inside the cabin and waited for dawn twelve hours away without knowing if they were truly gone or would come back and eventually find a way in.

  About an hour after the scratching and pawing had stopped, he heard the shots, three of them, the sound distant and muffled but undeniably north. He guessed another bunch had landed up near the point.

  “I had all kinds of images in my head,” he said, “but you know what the main one was?”

  I shook my head. “What?”

  “Parts, like those bodies in Washington that had been all cut up. I thought I’d find the same thing up here, people torn limb from limb and the world thinking I was crazy when I tried to report it.”

  Dawn had brought sunlight, clear skies, and fresh cool air. He had pulled in the anchor and started north thinking someone needed to tell the world. A mile up the coast, he had run hard aground. With the tide going out, he’d ended up stranded on a sandbar half a mile off out, waiting for the water to come back and float him free. Most of the day we’d spent cleaning, he had spent sitting. By the time the tide had poured enough water into the sound to lift him free, he had less than three hours of daylight left. Figuring that dead bodies weren’t going anywhere, he’d opted to cook dinner and hunt deeper water before sundown. He had fired up a burner on the grill, fetched a cast iron frying pan, and started cutting up potatoes.

  Gabriel reckoned that the heat is what drove them out of the cavity between motor well and grill. He heard a thump behind him, a soft, mushy sound like someone dropping a ball of clay onto a potter’s wheel. He spun around and saw one staggering across the deck. Behind it, arms and wings fought to free themselves from the dead space under the grill. He held the frying pan like a baseball bat and smacked the first one hard enough to send it sprawling against the engine cover even as a second imp flopped out on the deck.