Children of the Island

by Wright, T. M.

  "Marie?" he said again.

  "Carol," she said, louder.

  "He's wacko, the guy's wacko!"

  "I resent that word," someone said. "I really do resent that word. It's crass, it's insensitive—"

  "It's ten-thirty-five, not ten-forty-five. My Seiko's always right."

  "Is there something bothering you?" Carol asked again. "Please, is there something bothering you?"

  "Marie?"

  "No, Carol." A pause, then, "Why does he keep calling me 'Marie'?"

  "I told you, he's wacko!"

  The temperature climbed another degree, then began edging inexorably higher. Sweat covered Jim's face like an oily mask. "Marie," he said, "I'm so sorry."

  "Carol," the woman told him again. "My name is Carol."

  "Would you believe," Jim went on, his tone straining for the conversational, "that I had never, ever fired a gun before, never in my life. It was chance, Marie. Chance! If I'd been aiming, of course, if I'd been aiming I would have missed, I would have missed by a country mile—"

  "I think he's talking about killing someone, that's what I think."

  "He's talking about shooting someone."

  "D'joo shoot someone, fella?"

  "You think he's got a gun in there with him right now?"

  Inside the closed car, the temperature pushed to 95.

  "I would have missed for sure," Jim said to himself. Then he turned his head quickly to the left and confronted one of the faces there. "But I didn't miss," he told the face. Then he shouted at it, "I didn't miss!"

  The face retreated; a look of shock and dismay fell over it. "Jesus, he did shoot someone!"

  "We gotta get a cop over here."

  "I think I saw a State Trooper in the restaurant. You want me to go get him?"

  "Yeah. Quick. We'll keep this guy in here till you get back."

  "Jesus, I don't think he's going anywhere. Hey fella, you going anywhere?"

  The temperature reached 96 inside the Thunderbird; Jim was feeling lightheaded. He saw Manhattan begin to melt in the heat, and his mouth fell open in awe. Several of the faces outside the car turned to follow his gaze and saw only a deep blue Adirondack sky sliced by evergreens, a couple of billboards, a tall, neon sign that read HOLIDAY INN.

  "What do you see?" Carol asked Jim.

  Jim didn't hear her. He had just watched the lights on the Con Ed building blink out. "No," he murmured, panic rising in him. He saw the lights blink on again, then off. "No," he said again, sharply. And in response the lights blinked on.

  "What's wrong?" Carol asked; she was feeling very frustrated.

  He turned, looked at her sadly, and mouthed the words, "It's melting!"

  "What?"

  "It's melting!" He said the words aloud now; she heard them.

  "What's melting?"

  He turned his head back. "Manhattan," he whispered, but no one heard him.

  "Anybody here got a gun?" someone said.

  Silence.

  "I said, anybody here got a gun?"

  "Why do we need a gun?" It was Carol.

  "'Cuz he might have one. And he's wacko!"

  Again, silence.

  "So, like I said, does anybody have a gun?"

  "I don't have one," someone said.

  "The State Trooper will be here in a second, so let's not—"

  "Hey . . ."

  "Why don't you open the door?" Carol said to Jim. "Hey, I just saw a goddamned streaker."

  "Why don't you open the door," Carol said again, more soothingly now.

  But Jim didn't hear her. "Manhattan is melting," he told her and he began to weep softly, as if in resignation, or defeat.

  "Jesus," someone said, "he thinks he's in Manhattan!"

  "I saw two of them, I saw two streakers!"

  "I think that trooper's coming."

  "Maybe we should all back away from the car, don'tcha think? Hey fella, you gonna shoot anyone?"

  Jim continued to weep; he had his arms folded on the top of the steering wheel.

  "I think we should call the fucking white coats!" someone said.

  "And I say we should all just back away, very slowly . . ."

  "Damn you!" Jim breathed.

  "D'joo say something, fella?"

  "Damn you!" he said aloud.

  "Why's he swearing like that?"

  "He's nutsed up, that's why."

  "I think we should just back away . . ."

  "Damn you!" Jim shouted. "Goddamn you!"

  The crowd that had gathered around the Thunderbird backed away quickly.

  The children knew well what hunger was. They had sprung from the earth knowing what it was; the ache, the need—and satisfying it was passion itself, as much a part of each of them as breathing was.

  They ate to stay alive.

  They ate so their species could stay alive.

  And they ate whatever the earth provided them.

  The tableau which had developed in the Route 22A Holiday Inn parking lot—fifteen miles from the house on the island—was growing increasingly tense. At first, for the dozen or so people who had clustered around the Thunderbird a half hour earlier, it had been merely a break to the morning's routine: Hey, look at this—there's some guy sitting stiff as a board in his car here, and he won't say nothin'. It was something to speculate about—"He must be on dope." ". . .Maybe he's having some kind of fit." ". . .He could be diabetic." just a few minutes of casual entertainment.

  And then someone had remarked how "scruffy the guy looks," and someone else had suggested that Jim was probably just "a bum sleeping off a quart of Pinot Chardonnay," which no one found particularly funny. At last, the humanitarian in the group had pointed out that it was probably going to get pretty hot in the Thunderbird.

  Which was when Jim had realized he didn't have the car keys.

  No one in the Holiday Inn parking lot saw Seth, or Elena, or the children. They had merged into the perimeter of the surrounding piney woods and they were seeing what Jim was seeing, and feeling what he was feeling. And the mist swirling out from inside the car, from inside Jim Hart himself, and the rich, dark colors and striations of madness in it.

  With Jim, Seth and Elena and the children were watching Manhattan melt into its horizon.

  They were watching an Adirondack horizon rise up in its place.

  And because they were trying very hard to understand what they were seeing, they had set aside their vast hunger. For the moment.

  "Didn't you say the trooper was coming? I don't see no trooper."

  "I thought it was the trooper—it was the bus driver."

  "The bus driver?"

  "Question is—what are we gonna do with this guy? Look at him." Everyone looked; they saw that Jim's face had turned beet red. "He's gonna die unless we get him out. It must be a hundred degrees in there."

  Carol spoke. "Open the door," she shouted at Jim. But Jim didn't answer. He was sitting up in the seat, and he was mumbling something—no one could hear what. "Open the door!" Carol repeated.

  "It's called heat prostration," the man next to her said.

  "I had a dog die of it once. My wife left him in the car . . ."

  "I got a gun!" someone announced suddenly, and shrilly. All faces turned toward the voice. They saw a short, thin, middle-aged man, dressed in a baggy gray suit. He was holding his right arm out, wrist bent, and there was a small black pistol in his hand. Its barrel was pointing downward. The man looked like he had little idea what he was going to do with the gun. He looked, in fact, as if he was sorry he'd brought the whole thing up.

  "I don't think we need it," someone said.

  The thin man stared a moment at the gun. Then his grip tightened around it. "You can never tell for sure," he stammered, "when you're gonna need a gun. Not for sure." He grinned, pleased with the analysis. He lowered his arm, so the gun still pointed at the ground, but now his finger was on the trigger, and his grip was very tight. He made his way through the cluster of people to the passenger's
side of the car. He smiled grimly at Jim. "Hi guy," he said. Jim didn't turn to look. He continued mumbling incoherently. "Cat got your tongue," said the thin man. Jim still didn't turn to notice him. The thin man's smile faded. He brought the gun up to the window, placed it flat on the glass. "You can see this, can't you guy?!" Jim still did not turn to notice.

  "This is foolish!" Carol said.

  "This is not foolish!" hissed the thin man, and Carol fell silent.

  "Marie?" Jim whispered.

  The thin man knocked the gun against the window. Once. "Open up, guy." He gave Jim a long and thorough once-over and saw what he supposed was a bulge in the pocket of Jim's jacket. "Hey guy, what you got in there?" Jim had nothing in the pocket. It bulged because the fabric had decided to bulge.

  The thin man turned to the others in the group. "I think he's got a gun in his jacket pocket."

  "Marie," Jim said. "Oh, Marie!" he shouted, and threw his arms down, against the steering wheel, and buried his face in his hands.

  It took the thin man by surprise. He jumped back, spread his legs wide, straightened his arms. He had the gun pointed directly at Jim's head. "Get outa there!" he screeched. "Get outa there!" He was very nervous.

  Jim took no notice of him.

  The thin man fired. Once.

  Carol screamed. One of the men screamed. Behind the group, the State Trooper bellowed, "Drop that weapon!" and the thin man turned toward the voice very quickly.

  Had the trooper not taken him by surprise, the thin man would have done as ordered—he would have dropped the gun. But because he had been taken by surprise, he kept his arms straight, and the gun level. And just as he finished turning, and had begun to explain, grinningly, what exactly he was doing—"I thought it was advisable–" —the trooper fired. A .38 caliber slug tore into the thin man's chest. It zigzagged around in his lungs for a moment, slammed sideways through his heart, and exited through his back. It came to rest in the Thunderbird's front left tire, which began to deflate immediately.

  The thin man slumped to his knees. He fell face forward to the pavement.

  Carol screamed again.

  The State Trooper cursed beneath his breath, "Goddammit, Jesus Christ, Goddammit!"

  A man screamed.

  And, at the perimeter of the piney woods, Seth screamed. And Elena. And so did the children gathered around them.

  The trooper looked up from the thin man's body. "What in the hell?" he breathed.

  Seth forced himself into silence. But Elena could not. Nor could the children. And so their screams, like a chorus of shrill echoes, continued.

  "What in the hell is that?" said the trooper.

  "My God!" someone else said.

  "An echo," Carol said. "An echo," she repeated, although she knew well enough that it was not an echo. She was a remarkably sensitive, intelligent, and gentle woman—the mother of three, an up-and-coming commercial artist, highly thought of in her little community.

  She was the first to die that morning at the hands of the children.

  Chapter 34

  It was without a doubt one of the very best ways to die. Not because it was quick—for most it wasn't; for most it was slow, almost fantastically slow. And not because it was painless—it wasn't; it was alive with pain. But because it was so easily denied. Death just could not happen that way. And so it had to be something else. It had to be a fantasy, some kind of dream, a hallucination or an illusion, some sort of awful fit, perhaps.

  But it could not be death. It certainly could not be death!

  In the midst of it, when the pain was screaming through her body and her forearms had been opened up wide, down to the bone—as if being made ready for surgery—and her belly had been ripped away, revealing the crowd of organs within, Carol thought of her children, and the swimming classes that her youngest was scheduled to begin the following day, and how glad she was of that. And then blessed unconsciousness overtook her and she made the transition from life into death with plans for tomorrow in her head.

  A man named Albert, looking on from close by, found that he was smiling, as if some kind of performance were being staged for him. He saw shadows moving swiftly around him and he remembered that he had seen similar shadows—on windy days, when low, small clouds scurried overhead, and the sky was blue and bright behind them.

  He saw Carol fall amidst these shadows; he saw her being opened up and reduced to her vitals, and then to her bones, and from one moment to the next he felt that he could see faces turn, and stare up at him from what was being done. Faces that were small and dark and layered with Carol's blood. Faces which, he knew, without that mask of blood would have been exquisitely beautiful, as perfect as anything the earth can produce.

  The faces of children.

  And the trooper, lying face down on the pavement, his eyes opened wide in awe and shock, and the pain searing through his legs (where the children had begun their meal) thought deep in the recesses of his brain that he'd be up until midnight or later filling out reports on this one, and that he didn't want to be up past midnight filling out reports. Because he had other plans.

  And someone passing by in an old Buick, on Route 22A, a hundred feet east, slowed to a crawl and said to his passenger, "Hey, looka that! I wonder what the hell's going on there!"

  His passenger looked. He saw the same shadows that Albert had seen, and through them, as if he were looking through a veil, he saw the suggestion of bodies heaped about, arms and legs turned and maneuvered into improbable positions. And all around, something like a dark rain was falling—rising up, shifting sideways, falling. "It's some kind of dust storm," he said, knowing even as he said it that it wasn't a dust storm at all. He turned his head quickly. "Don't stop," he said to the driver, very urgently. And then he looked again at the scene in the parking lot. "It's just a dust storm of some kind," he repeated. And then, as if to himself, "Don't stop," he whispered. And the driver sped on toward New York.

  Fifteen years earlier; Near Penn Yann, New York:

  The creature had fallen seventy feet to the bare earth from the upper branches of an aged honey locust. The creature had climbed the honey locust for no other reason than it could climb it; and it had fallen because it knew nothing about old trees and decayed branches. It knew only about itself—what pain was, and what cold was—and how to protect itself from the cold—and it knew about heat, and hunger, and about desire. It knew what the earth said it must know.

  The creature did not know it was dying. Since its birth only weeks before, it had killed, and it had seen death, and it had experienced life. But it could not give names or meanings to anything—its brain was not set up for clutter.

  The fall from the honey locust—which would not have been fatal had the creature jumped instead of fallen wildly out of control—had broken the creature's back. One lower rib, as well, had pierced its heart. And so it was dying. Very painfully and slowly.

  Its eyes followed the subtly changing patterns of light and shadow all around. That changing pattern was what it had first seen, weeks before, when the earth was done giving it life.

  The creature could not smile. If it were human, it might. But it wasn't. So, blankly, it watched the changing patterns of light and shadow; it experienced the pain. And, in time, life stopped within it.

  Forever.

  The new creature pushed itself up to a half-sitting position. It stood. It felt the soft creepers of the hard wind that was pushing the tops of the trees about; it heard the busy, quick noises of squirrels and rabbits and raccoons, and a thousand others, making ready for the winter. It saw the changing patterns of light and shadow all around.

  And it felt its muscles moving gracefully over its bones; the air swelling its lungs.

  The others present at the birth touched and prodded the creature. Wonderingly. Because the creature was alive, and warm. As they were. And because they could see. And hear. And taste. And smell. And also touch.

  Because they had sprung from the earth. And they were
alive.

  Chapter 35

  At The Stone

  Snipe had good ears. "Ears like a dog," he was fond of telling people . . . and it was almost true. A small accident of biology had blessed him not only with ears that were slightly outsized, but also ear canals and eardrums that were several decibels and several octaves more sensitive than those of most other people.

  It was a little past 8:00 P.M., and Snipe was in the middle of giving the nine people he had brought together in The Stone's lobby another pep talk about "staying in line and staying alive." He stopped talking in midsentence and turned his head quickly to the right, his gaze on an open concrete stairway about forty feet away, a stairway which led to the second floor.

  He had heard a stomach growl.

  One of his "lieutenants" (a designation that, by inference, made Snipe feel very important indeed), a boy nicknamed "Cheese," because he seemed to carry the faint, but unmistakable odor of cheese around with him, said, "D'ja hear something, Snipe?" Snipe did not answer. Cheese elected wisely to stay quiet.

  After half a minute, Snipe nodded once toward the stairway. "There!" he commanded. And immediately three of his lieutenants ran to the stairway and started up. They stopped as one when Snipe shouted at them, "Alive! I want that sucker alive!" Again as one they nodded and ran up the stairway.

  Georgie MacPhail could taste the blood seeping into his mouth from his lacerated gum. He liked the taste. He remembered something from "The Wild Wild World of Animals" about a tribe in Africa drinking cow's blood regularly and he thought that that was all right. If it tasted anything like people's blood, then it was probably habit-forming.

  He was trying very hard not to think about the events of the past few hours. About the poor, dumb kid who'd chased him down the fire escape. About the ugly whump! the kid's body had made after falling three floors to the damned blacktop behind the South Park Apartments. About the lousy, time-wasting tug of war that had gone on in his—Georgie's—mind when he'd seen the kid lying there, moaning and bleeding in his damned jockey shorts. "Goddamn you, kid!" Georgie had whispered at him.