FULL MOON ISLAND

by Terry Yates

  Time seemed to stand still as they watched the beast. Nobody moved for several seconds, either from fear or from the shock of actually seeing this thing up close…this thing that had most likely just killed their friend. As the sky was about to go dark again, Dixon saw…and he was pretty sure that the others saw…the creature lay back its ears as if ready for attack.

  “Let him have it!” Dixon screamed, shining his flashlight on the beast just as the sky went black.

  Immediately the others turned their lights toward the beast and began firing their pistols. The thing howled in pain as it leapt through the air landing on top of Pvt. King. King got out half a scream before the thing’s great claws began to shred him to pieces. The soldiers continued to fire as the monster opened its mouth wide, then closed it again around his stomach. They could hear the flesh tearing as it pulled stomach, liver, and intestines from the new corpse. It turned its head to sky, opened its mouth, and veraciously swallowed King’s innards. It then bayed loudly at the night sky.

  “Keep shooting!” Dixon yelled, firing at the beast.

  The men continued to fire, but the beast was too quick, this time leaping through the air and landing in front of Pvt. Bethea. In one swift move, it swung its huge claws at the man, and separated his head from his shoulders, sending the head flying through the air like a baseball that had just hit the sweet spot on the bat. After that, everything turned to chaos and it was a free for all, each of the soldiers running blindly in different directions, some attempting to shoot over their shoulders.

  The beast was swift and caught Pvt. Albritton within seconds, picking him up off of the ground and holding him high above its head, massive claws digging deep into both shoulders. The doomed soldier defecated himself as the beast lowered him down to its own level, nose to nose, face to face. To the soldier, it looked like the beast was smiling at him as it drew his face to within inches of its own. Hot breath blew through its nostrils almost scorching him while its mouth began to grow wider and wider, its breath fetid with blood, decay, and God knew what else. Up close, Albritton could see that its canine teeth and incisors were roughly the same length…about four inches long, top and bottom. He thought that its jaws would unhinge as its mouth finally stopped opening. It looked like a bear trap ready to be sprung. Pvt. Jack Albritton knew what was coming next. The brain, knowing that it’s going to die and there’s nothing that can be done to stop it, tends to say “screw it, see you in the next world”. The pain in his shoulders had been searing, but now it seemed to ease a little…once again the brain saying, “Screw it”. He just wished that his buddies had not stopped firing. He wanted to be hit. He wanted one of their bullets to land in his brain and not give this piece of shit walking dog the satisfaction of eating him alive. But no such bullet came. His comrades in arms had abandoned him to his fate, a fate he knew was just about to hurt like hell. As if on cue, the beast quickly placed its top palate above Albritton’s head and its lower palate below his chin and then bit down with such ferocity that it completely bit off the front half of Albritton’s head, severing his forehead, face, chin, everything…all the way to his ears, chewing the meat and sucking the blood with animalistic delight.

  As he ran, Dixon thought that his heart was going to pound right out of his chest. He ran blindly through the dark, the wind and the rain at his back. He heard a scream about fifty yards behind him. He thought it was Koontz, he didn’t know why, because all bloodcurdling screams tend to sound the same. He didn’t have time to turn around. Marcus Dixon wasn’t a coward but he wasn’t stupid either. Fighting this thing was no different than trying to fight a tank. You could shoot bullets at it all day, but if they bounced off and it kept coming, you retreated…granted you were supposed to retreat in an orderly fashion, but they had just thrown the Army Regulations Handbook out the window after watching King get torn to pieces.

  Dixon was having trouble moving through the fields, the debris was getting worse by the moment. He stumbled twice, the second time cutting his shin on a sheet of tin that had landed nearby. As he got up, he could tell that he was bleeding badly from his leg, but a cut shin was the least of his problems at the moment.

  He heard another scream. He knew it had to be Martinez. He was the only one of them unaccounted for. The scream lasted longer than the others. He heard cursing, angry cursing along with the cries of pain. Good old Martinez wasn’t going down without a fight…but he was going down, which left only him…the unit’s leader, the man who had been put in charge of a simple task of making a few things hurricane ready and he’d screwed it up the yam shoot and now he was running for his life.

  Dixon figured that he couldn’t run from this thing, so he would have to hide from it, but where? He looked around. He had plenty of debris to hide under, but one thing he didn’t want was to hide under a piece of debris and have either something else like a telephone pole or a car land on top of him, or whatever he was lying under to fly off of him while the monster was looking for him.

  The thing howled loudly. It seemed to know that there was one item on the smorgasbord still uneaten. Without taking another moment to think, Dixon dove on the ground between two trees, which had landed in the field. He grabbed the sheet of tin and put it on top of the two trees, giving himself a little shelter from the storm but not from the beast who was now hunting no one but him. He held onto each side of the tin with his bare hands, the metal cutting his fingers, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. Keeping it from flying off of him was his main concern.

  He tried to listen for the approaching beast, but between the wind blowing and the rain pelting the tin, he couldn’t hear a thing except his own heartbeat. He waited…and waited…and waited. It either hadn’t picked up his scent yet, or it was just having a little fun before dessert. By the way it had just stood there until they had made a move, told him that it was the latter.

  After a few seconds, he thought he heard the sound of feet sloshing through the water. The sound couldn’t have been more than fifteen feet away from him. Dixon clinched the tin tighter. Please stay on! Please stay on! Please…He heard it again, closer this time, no more than ten feet. He wanted to believe that it was one of the others or someone who had come looking for them, but he knew that was impossible on both accounts. None of the others were left unless Gunderson got away, and Potts wouldn’t send anyone out to look for them till morning anyway. Besides, whoever or whatever was moving around just above him was no man. Those weren’t the footsteps of a man. There was no pacing, no cadence, no rhythm to it. These footsteps sounded more like something tiptoeing around in no particular direction.

  He heard the thing walking around him now, panting, with the sound of heavy laborious breathing shooting in and out of its nostrils and mouth. He could hear it sniffing the air…looking for him. God, what was it? He didn’t have to answer that. He knew what it was. He’d known what it was right from the very beginning, but he didn’t want to think it. It’s all it could be. He’d seen enough scary movies in his life. It’s a… Before he could finish his thought, he felt the ground next to him shake. It was now directly above him, growling…growling like it knew its prey was just below it…waiting…waiting to be savored and enjoyed.

  Dixon turned his head sideways and closed his eyes. He pulled the tin down even harder than before. Now he could feel it cutting deep into his fingers. What did he care? They were about to belong to this thing. Both sets of legs were on the ground now. Any other day, he would’ve thought it was a dog perhaps looking for a bone or a rabbit it had chased under the tin. He began to think of Shelly and of his twins that he would never know. And then the sheet of tin was yanked from his grasp.

  CHAPTER 14

  Samantha stood holding Sylvia’s hand. Sylvia was still muttering about the creature. The doctor’s sedatives were kicking in but not soon enough for Samantha’s sake. She had been trying to keep her quiet and still so that the doctor could finish operating on the little girl. She had refused the Colonel’s reques
t to put a pillow over her face and be done with it. God, how had she ended up here in this God forsaken place? Normally, right about now, she would be curled up around the fireplace, a glass of wine in her hand, thumbing through the current Vogue Magazine that she’d probably already looked at three times, but was still intrigued with those girls who got the really good, high paying gigs. Gringo would be out spending their money on a poker game or watching hockey and getting mad because she didn’t get the same thrill from it that he did…but here she was instead, in a room full of injured and scared people, wearing a nurse’s uniform that was five times too small and being ogled at by most every male…and one female…in the place.

  She watched as the doctor, the nurse, and the little girl’s mother continued to work on her. She wished that she could do something to help, but throughout her entire life, she had been made to feel stupid by both her parents and Gringo. By the age of fourteen, she was built exactly like she was now…and with her high voice and what she found out later to be Dyslexia, she was never encouraged to think. Right now though, she WAS thinking…thinking about what she was going to do if she got off this island in one piece. The first thing she was going to do was to hand Gringo his walking papers and then go up to Daphne LeBlanc’s office and tell her to start getting her bigger and better modeling jobs or she was going to find someone else to represent her. She was tired of being everyone’s little cupie doll. She stewed for a moment. Who was she kidding? She knew that the first thing that Gringo would do when she told him that she wanted a divorce, would to be either laugh, ignore her, or do what he was best at…sit her down and tell her how wrong he’d been about everything and how much he loved her and how special she was and how things would be different and how… She stopped and let out a deep sigh. Gringo would always have some sort of hold over her no matter what she did. Besides, she could just see herself storming into Daphne LeBlanc’s office and raising hell. Daphne would tell her that she was sorry she felt that way and would wish her good luck in her future endeavourers, then get on the phone and blackball her to everyone she knew. Daphne was well respected in the talent business. If you ever left Daphne, you’d better make sure that the William Morris Agency was your next stop or that would be all she wrote, Sister. Next stop, Porno Land where dozens of guys who looked just like Gringo would be letting you have it from all different directions. No, she was stuck. She’d be the poorest working model on the planet, and then when she got old, really old…thirty-five or forty…Gringo would be gone, the whole time wondering what she had done with all of her money.

  “You can let go now. I said, you can let go now.”

  Sylvia popped out of her trance to find Gringo standing next to her.

  “What?”

  “I said, you can let go now. Sylvia’s asleep.” Samantha looked down and indeed Sylvia was asleep, a tiny bit of drool running down her cheek. She hadn’t even noticed.

  “Oh,” she muttered softly, placing Sylvia’s limp hand across her stomach. “Where’ve you been?”

  “I was talking to that Zack kid,” he answered, looking over his shoulder at Zack Olsen who stood alone, leaning against a wall with his head down. “It’s a tough thing for a kid to find out his old man’s human. Can’t say’s I blame him. If my old man had taken off when we needed him, I’d be pretty down on him, too. Hey! Wait a minute!” he laughed, “that’s exactly what he did! There wasn’t no monster or nothin’, but he did take off when we needed him the most. Left us high and dry with no money and nothin’ to eat. Maybe that Freud guy was right.”

  “About what?” Samantha asked, puzzled.”

  “I don’t know. Say…I heard that colonel talkin’ with some of them soldier boys.”

  “What were they saying?” When she noticed the doctor’s back stiffen up, she knew that her voice had squeaked a little. A teacher had told her once that her voice gave fingernails across a chalkboard a good run for its money. “What were they saying?” she repeated, this time in a whispered tone.

  “They was sayin’ somethin’ about maybe needing to make it to higher ground. For some reason this hurricane is lasting longer than it should and he doesn’t know if this building can take much more.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “They’re not sure yet. They gotta wait till the Doc’s through operatin’ on the little girl to decide. That colonel don’t seem like somebody who waits on other people though, does he?”

  “No.” If there was one thing that Samantha did know from all of this was that Col. Potts was in charge wherever he went.

  “Well…” Gringo started, “I better get back over to that kid. He looks like he’s about to lose it again. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  He’d done it again. Every time she’d had enough, he managed to find a way to push the right button. He’d been sitting with that kid, trying to cheer him up, telling him at least he had a father. He said all the things that a kid in his position needed to hear when his father had just run away from a monster, leaving his mother to the same fate he himself would’ve received if he had not run away when he did. Shit. She still loved the conniving bastard.

  “Okay, Nurse, suture her up.” Kyler breathed a sigh of relief as he removed his fourth set of gloves that he had used during the two-hour operation. It was a small sigh. With the girl’s mother right in front of him and the knowledge that Lauren wasn’t out of the woods by any means, he didn’t want to send a signal of false hope. He had attached a draining tube to Lauren’s stomach to try and drain some of the infection out, but he didn’t know if it was going to do any good or not. This was his first burst appendix and he just didn’t know shit from shinola when it came to emergency surgery. Fractured bones and deep cuts had been his specialty so far.

  “Is she going to make it, Doctor Kyler?” It was Locklear O’Hearley standing beside him. Ariella must’ve let him know…probably through telekinesis or some implant in their heads…that the operation was over.

  “I don’t know how to answer that, Prof. O’Hearley,” he answered. “I think I did everything right, but watching an operation a couple of times and actually doing it are very different things. I don’t know how bad the infection is…but she seems to be a very strong young girl…mentally and physically. All we can do is hope for the best. We’re going to keep an eye on her round the clock. I wish I could say more, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  Kyler watched as Locklear and Ariella held each one of Lauren’s hands. Nurse Walling had removed the mask, cap and gloves from Ariella and was silently doing the same to him.

  “Well done, Doctor,” she said disposing his gloves into a waste paper can.

  “How can you tell?” he asked her. She didn’t answer him but instead began to check on the other patients that she had neglected for the last couple of hours.

  “Ya’ done, Doc?” Kyler turned to see Potts standing there, hands on hips looking up at him with the same look he probably gave his soldiers before ordering them to dig a latrine.

  “For now,” he answered trying to walk away. He needed to check on Opal Munn, but as he started to pass Potts, the colonel grabbed his arm at the bicep and pulled him away from the others.

  “I don’t know how much longer we can stay in this building. It’s starting to shake pretty badly and my men tell me that the bottom floor is under about two feet of water right now.”

  “What are you saying, Colonel?”

  “I’m sa-a-ying that we might have to leave here and seek higher ground. The hospital, in case you haven’t noticed, is very close to the ocean. These people need to be moved.”

  “We can’t move that little girl just now.”

  “We might not have a choice.”

  “What about…” Kyler bent down and whispered to Potts. “What about that…that thing out there?”

  “My guess that thing out there is probably dead. If it’s not, I don’t think it’ll bother us again.”

  “What makes you so sure?”

  “Because
we fought it and it ran away from us in case you don’t remember.”

  “Perhaps to live and fight another day?” Kyler asked in his best condescending smart assed tone. “Has Sgt. Cohen heard anything over the radio?”

  “No, he gets bits and pieces of transmissions but not much else. Christ, his ear must be red as a beet from pressing it against that walkie-talkie. Bottom line, Doc, we’ve gotta do something.”

  Kyler looked over at Lauren. He could see some of the puss draining out of her tube into a bedpan he’d found. Shit, what was he supposed to do, take a chance on saving one at the cost of everyone else, or try to move her and take the chance of killing her? He knew he couldn’t just leave her and her parents behind. That was out of the question. If the water was rising, he supposed they could stay here and wait it out, but heavy objects were constantly bombarding the building. Who knew what damage the building might receive? He looked at Potts.