by Terry Yates
Samantha jumped up from the blanket. Furious, she turned to Gringo who stood there with an “I’ve been a bad boy” look etched upon his face. As she threw on her robe, she attempted to give Gringo and Sylvia an earful but neither could hear her over the din of the catcalling, crotch grabbing servicemen.
She stomped across the beach and over to the jeep that Gringo had procured for their stay. She jumped in the passenger seat, but not before one more round of catcalling because, when she jumped into the jeep, her robe bunched up around her waist exposing her buttocks. She yanked her robe back down, crossed her arms, and fumed. She peered over the top of her sunglasses, giving her an even more ominous expression.
As she fumed, she watched Gringo and Sylvia slowly make their way to the jeep, neither attempting to hurry the process. She expected as much from Gringo but Sylvia had been her photographer for the last ten shoots and she had thought that they had formed a mother/daughter bond, but just like everyone else, herself included, Sylvia had fallen for Gringo’s smooth banter. Her father had warned her about him on their first date when Gringo had used his Eddie Haskelisms on his prom date’s father.
“That kid could talk a hooker into paying him,” he had told her as she had walked through the door after the prom, her hair mussed and her dress rumpled.
She had given herself to him in the backseat of his father’s ‘67’ Mustang. She didn’t know how or why she had done it. One minute they were talking shit about the prom queen and the next, her head and neck were bent against the armrest with Gringo’s beer soaked breath panting on her neck. After that, everything went very quickly. She got pregnant after her very first sexual encounter, they had gotten married, she miscarried, they moved to New York where she had worked every known job from file clerk to deli waitress to upscale restaurant waitress. Her modeling career started when Gringo set her up with a few fly-by-night magazines where she made two hundred dollars a nude session. She dreaded the day those photos came to light.
She got her big break two and a half years earlier when Daphne LeBlanc, owner and CEO of LeBlanc Modeling Agency, spotted her with Gringo in the office lobby. Gringo had been trying to talk the receptionist into seeing Daphne, but was having no luck. His charm just didn’t work on the young woman who made the turn of the century spinster librarian look like an exotic dancer. Daphne had just gotten out of the elevator and immediately noticed Samantha’s long legs crossed as she sat embarrassed while her husband continued to go nose to nose with the receptionist, each spraying the other with spit as their voices rose ever higher. As the two yelled at one another, Daphne grabbed Samantha, pulled her into her office, talked to her, signed her, and booked her for her first print job before the two protagonists realized that they were alone. Within three weeks, she was getting steady modeling gigs and making decent money. Unfortunately, she wasn’t getting to keep any of it, so she was having to take any job she could get which wasn’t making Daphne happy. Samantha was a LeBlanc Girl and as such was contracted to only do shoots for the agency. She had told Samantha time and again to drop Gringo…that he was going to ruin her career, but Gringo always said the right thing that seemed to make sense at the moment. So why was she stuck on this island in an abandoned café, wearing nothing but the robe she had been wearing at the shoot? The strong wind or a soldier had taken her clothes and absconded with them. Now, here she was, watching her husband wolf down his steak and French fries that he had found in the restaurant freezer. The only saving grace was that he hadn’t made her cook it for him.
“When are we getting off this island?” she asked him not sure if he had heard her through his grunting.
“Wheer na gwawn leee…” he answered, his mouth so full that bits of potato were flying through the air and landing very close to Samantha.
“What do you mean…we’re not going to leave?” she shot back. “There’s a hurricane coming or haven’t you noticed the helicopters flying back and forth evacuating everyone?”
Gringo extended his index finger in a “just a moment” pose as he choked down his food. He chewed and chewed for what seemed like an eternity before he spoke again.
“We’re staying,” he finally said as the last chunk of steak made its way down his throat.
“Staying? With a hurricane coming?”
“Hurricane, my ass! They’ve got something on this island that’s tres importante’ and that’s why they’re evacuating everyone.”
“Not because the skies are darkening by the minute and the wind is blowing jeeps over?”
Gringo took another bite.
“Nah…that’s just a coincidence. There’s something on this island.”
Samantha put her elbow down and placed her chin in her hand.
“So there’s something so important that they’ve pretty much let us go where we wanted to without too much security?”
Gringo wanted to laugh. It always amused him when Samantha spoke. She had a high sort of “Dumb Dora” voice and anytime she said something half assed intellectual, it cracked him up.
“This could be a gold mine,” he told her as he soaked his fries with even more ketchup. “Who knows? There could be spaceships…or even aliens on this island. That’s it! I’ll bet it’s aliens. Maybe we can get a nudie snapshot of you with an alien!”
Samantha had seen the wheels turning in Gringo’s head and once the wheels started turning, they could not be stopped. She laid her head down on the table as he continued to spew theories and food. She’d had enough. She was going to tell him that that was the most asinine thing that she had ever heard. She was going to tell him that she was leaving this God forsaken island as soon as possible. The courage inside her was bubbling to the fore like hot lava from a volcano, when something that sounded like a low flying jet shrieked overhead.
CHAPTER 5
It was four in the afternoon and Kyler, Nurse Walling, Sgt. Cohen, and an elderly man named Burt Burns were moving the six remaining patients into the small hospital lobby. Kyler was amazed at his trio of helpers. Cohen was in his early fifties and moved with the grace of a man twenty years his junior, Nurse Walling had been working nonstop all day long and hadn’t slowed down…and even Burt Burns who was seventy-three and covered head to toe with arthritis was managing to move around with a Barishnikov like grace. It must be true, Kyler thought, old folks have afterburners when it comes to doing hard things in grave or tense situations.
“Ow! Ow! Ow!” Michael Blum had continued to scream aloud as Burt Burns wheeled him down the small corridor. Burt was pushing the gurney by himself and seemed to be purposely making the bed zigzag and hit each side of the corridor walls. Michael’s leg was now broken in two places after he’d been knocked off of the gurney by Dr. Kyler when the jet had crashed into the ocean. He knew that the old man was hitting the walls on purpose after having overheard the twelve year old tell another patient that old people smelled like pee. He couldn’t wait to tell his parents about the doctor re-breaking his leg, or the nurse who left him alone on the floor after telling him to go take an aspirin. And now this…an old man purposely banging his head against each side of a hallway. He had watched as the old man pushed other gurneys down the hallway with ease and dexterity but when it came time for him to be wheeled away…and last at that…the old man had suddenly become clumsy and oafish.
“Oops!” he had said after the first hit…”Sorry about that!”…after the second one…and “Do you smell pee?” after the third and hardest one. Michael swore he heard Nurse Walling chuckle as the old man ran back down the hall to help with another patient.
These people were going to have hell to pay when his parents found out about all of this. His father, Arnold Blum II, was worth more than everyone on this island put together. He was a government lawyer, oilman, stockbroker, and all around entrepreneur who had owned much of No Name Island before giving it or selling it to the government, Michael wasn’t sure which. At twelve years old, he didn’t worry about such trivialities. All he knew was that he had be
en born on the island and had lived here his whole life with his father, his mother, Martha, and their three dogs, four horses, and two cats in their nice mansion, which sat just off the northern beach. They also had six servants, two boats, one yacht, and even a limousine, which carted Michael back and forth from the island school, which his mother had been dead set against. She thought he should be home schooled or at the very least educated with other boys of the Blum’s socio-economic status. Arnold Blum had decided against it. He wanted Michael to be President one day…or at least a senator…and it wouldn’t do in this day and age for a presidential candidate to come from affluence and be educated in a private school. The time of the Kennedy’s was nearly gone now. No, he would have to be among other kids his age and instead of going to Harvard, Brown, or even Notre Dame, if it came to that, he would have to go to Cal Tech, University of Texas, or Michigan. They were elite enough without being gaudy. They were of the people.
Where were his parents? He had not seen nor heard from them since early that morning when he had decided to ride his bicycle into town. He had only been gone an hour when the wind had knocked him over the tank, breaking his leg. Both the doctor and the old nurse had told him that they would get hold of his parents, and both said that they had tried but the phone lines were down and cell phones were almost useless anyway. He didn’t want to admit it, but he was becoming frightened. His leg ached, the winds were so strong now that the tiny hospital was actually shaking, and now he couldn’t find his parents.
He wanted to cry but the old man had just wheeled him into the lobby with the other patients and parked him right next to Lauren O’Hearley, the kookiest girl on the planet, as far he was concerned. She was eleven years old…a year younger than Michael, but to him she seemed no older than five or six. Sometimes. While she was known to look off into the distance at any given moment, or stop abruptly for reasons known only to her, or smile at someone who wasn’t even there, she could just as quickly turn around and recite all of Shakespeare’s sonnets verbatim…even the little known ones…and then tell you the capital of every single African nation in alphabetical order according to population, foliage, and year round temperature. She had bushy auburn hair and constantly had the look of one of those comic book characters with exclamation marks coming out of their heads. As far as he knew, she didn’t have any friends…well friends that everyone could see. Nobody wanted to be seen with someone who still thought Santa Claus was real and E. T. was a documentary. All he really knew about her was that her parents were some sort of scientists and worked deep in the bunkers of No Name Island. They seemed nearly as strange as she did.
As Burt wheeled him up beside Lauren, she looked over at him and smiled weakly, an IV sticking out of her arm.
“What are you here for?” she asked him, her eyes barely able to focus from the painkillers.
Michael thought it a stupid question since he lay there with his leg in a cast.
“Broken leg,” he answered uncomfortably.
“Appendicitis,” she said, her smile almost fading. “Does it hurt much?”
“A little,” Michael lied. His leg was throbbing so badly that he thought it would surely break through the cast.
“You can hold my hand if the pain gets too bad.”
“That’s okay.” The last thing he wanted to do was to let anyone see him holding hands with the island loony.
“Just let me know,” she answered, unhurt by his rejection.
“Am I going to have to separate you two?”
Michael looked up to see Dr. Kyler standing in the small space between his and Lauren’s gurneys.
“How are you feeling, Lauren?” he asked trying his best to sound cheery. He’d had three days packed into one and it was starting to show. His eyes had dark circles under them, and his hair, which had been in disarray anyway since he’d swam out to the jet, now stuck up in strategic places. It was obvious he had curly hair that he tried to keep straight.
“Look who we found,” Kyler told the girl, beaming.
Lauren smiled as her parents moved around the doctor and stood stone-faced looking down at their daughter. Both were dressed in immaculately white lab coats. Kyler looked down at his own white coat and for a moment became embarrassed. While Lauren’s parents lab coats looked like they’d been pressed and ironed while they were wearing them, his looked tattered and shabby as if it had been removed from a garbage truck and then summarily run over by it.
“Hello, Parents both,” Lauren greeted them smiling through the painkiller haze.
“Hello, Offspring of the Female Gender,” her mother answered soberly looking down at Lauren.
Kyler, Burt Burns, and even Michael all gazed at them oddly. Noticing this, Lauren’s father turned to Kyler.
“It’s our way,” he told the trio, almost a hint of a smile showing through his serious veneer.
The three still continued to watch, as did the other four patients, two of who were old ladies, the other a soldier’s wife who had just given birth to twins, and Burt Burns’ brother, Martin, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
“I see,” was all that Kyler could say.
“I’m Professor Locklear O’Hearley,” the man offered, his monotone voice reminding Kyler of a computer voice in an old sci-fi movie. “And this is my wife, Dr. Ariella O’Hearley.”
The woman looked up for a moment and nodded to Kyler who had been trying to figure out which one Lauren more closely resembled. Locklear was a large man…tall and with a bit of a middle aged spread, while Ariella was thin and pasty with fairly short blond hair and wore glasses that didn’t quite seem to fit right on her nose. They both looked like the kind of people whom you could never tell their exact age. The only fair guess would be to say that they were between the ages of thirty-five and sixty.
“So you’re both doctors,” Kyler said trying to break the awkward silence. “I guess that makes you a paradox.”
“I’m sorry,” Prof. O’Hearley said, a look of complete ignorance covering his face.
Kyler’s joke had been lost on the two.
“I…uh…was just saying that since you were a doctor and your wife…uh…was a doctor…that you were a paradox.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t get you Dr. Kyler,” Prof. O’Hearley said bluntly.
“A paradox. Get it? A pair of docs? You’re a doctor and she’s a doctor? You’re two docs?”
“I think I get it,” Ariella spoke up. “He’s under the delusion that we’re both doctors…ergo a pair of docs, but clearly since you told him that I was a doctor and that you were a professor, the joke really doesn’t work.”
“Yes, I see,” said Locklear finally getting it.
“No,” Ariella continued. “Now if my husband had said that you, Dr. Kyler, and I Dr. O’Hearley were a paradox, it would’ve made more sense.”
Kyler stood there feeling like one of those Loony Toon characters that, when made to look stupid, turned into a braying ass.
“Yes, I suppose I could have said that you two were a pair of Dockers…like the pants,” Locklear added. “Although technically he would’ve been right. I have a PhD, so he’s right in the fact that I am a doctor, but since I’m also a professor of physics and choose the title “Professor”, still does not alter the fact that I’m also a doctor. So you see…he is right.”
Ariella slid her glasses back up onto her nose and grimaced in thought. She had the face of a woman who had just been offered a turd sandwich.
“I suppose. So I guess we are a paradox, Dr. Kyler.”
Kyler stood there quietly. He felt somehow like he was standing inside a Picasso painting, his eyes on one side of his face and his mouth and nose on the other. He was saved by the sound of Nurse Walling’s voice.
“Doctor?” she called softly. Kyler turned around.
“Yes?” answered Kyler and both O’Hearley’s.
Nurse Walling looked stupefied at the sound of all three answering her. Kyler smiled, relieved that the subject was
changing.
“I believe this one’s for me, Professor and Doctor O’Hearley. What is it, Nurse Walling?”
“We need to move the other gentleman.”
Kyler had almost forgotten about the John Doe.
“Right. We’re going to need all the help we can get.” He pointed to Sgt. Cohen. “Sergeant, would you mind…”
Before Kyler could finish, Sgt. Cohen had nodded, removed his helmet and started down the hall with Kyler and Nurse Walling.
“What about Lauren, Doctor?” It was Lauren’s mother. “What about her appendix?”
God, this wasn’t the best of times to have to operate on an inflamed appendix.
“I’m sorry, Misses…eh…Dr. O’Hearley, I’m afraid we’re going to have to wait till we get to Miami to operate on Lauren.”
Locklear O’Hearley stepped forward.
“Miami? We had no intentions of going to Miami.”
“What?” Kyler found himself almost glaring at the pair. “What do you mean you had no intentions of going to Miami?”
Ariella stepped forward.
“I think what my husband is trying to say is that we presumed that you would operate here and then we’d be on our way.”
“On your way?” Nurse Walling exclaimed loudly as she stopped in the hallway and turned around. “And just where do you think you’re going, pray tell?”
“We we’re going into the bunker,” Locklear answered.
“The bunker? What bunker? Do you mean the base bunkers?” Kyler asked. “The place where no one is allowed to go including the President from what I understand?”