by Terry Yates
CHAPTER 41
Kyler had been half right. The fog had been so thick that he hadn’t been able to see the hospital from the bunker, but from that distance, he wouldn’t have been able to see it anyway…the way it was now. He was still a couple of hundred yards away from it, but he could see it well enough to know that it was missing the top two floors. He should’ve figured it out when he saw a smashed copy machine with the words “City Hospital” written on it barely a tenth of a mile from the bunker. It was a good thing that they’d had Potts with them. Had they stayed, they would’ve all been killed, seeing as how the floor that they had moved to was now gone, several of the bricks from the building now lying at his feet.
Kyler looked out toward the ocean. It was nearly 8:00 now, but the fog was still thick. Fog in Florida. He had not seen fog in his three months on No Name, and he wasn’t too sure that fog even came to this part of the world.
Even though the sun was trying to poke holes through the mist, it remained overcast and breezy. It wasn’t raining anymore, not even sprinkling, and he was thankful for that. Damn, he was sick of being wet.
He continued to peer across the ocean until he spotted the jet. He could plainly see the tail section sticking up in the air giving it an almost ominous look, as if it were some great sea monster sticking its head up out of the water. That tail section had survived the crash and two hurricanes. Kyler considered that an amazing feat. Had it just been the day before yesterday that he had heard it crash into the ocean? Had it just been forty-eight hours since he had swam out to it to check on survivors, dodging body parts along the way?
He began walking downhill toward the town. The two hurricanes had flooded the whole area, but thankfully the water had receded back into the ocean. He could already see that most of the town was gone. Like the hospital, there were half-buildings here and there. He saw that part of Kleineman’s Drug Store was still standing, but Ragee’s Barber Shop and White’s Hardware were completely gone, only the foundations remained.
As he moved closer towards the town, he saw a sink from God knew where, a Steinway piano that had probably been shiny and new just two days before, but was now covered with the same muck that everything on the island was covered with, and he saw a dead horse, legs splayed out to the side, its face contorted in fear and pain, its last frightening moments frozen in time.
When he reached the bottom of the hill, he was no more than fifty yards from the town square…or three-quarters square…as it was known, because a town square is enclosed on all four sides, but the town three-quarter square was shaped more like a squared off horse shoe, the ocean being the fourth part of the enclosure. Now, it was going to get tricky. There were telephone poles, some with their now useless power lines still wrapped around them. There was a boat on top of the building that had once been…he had to laugh…an Army-Navy store. All of this was exasperating for the young doctor. Who the hell built a city next to the ocean…especially an ocean whose gods were known to conjure up a dozen or more hurricanes a year? And why the hell had he come to a place where said gods seemed to enjoy such leisurely activities?
“They always seem to miss us,” Old Rennie Rorshon had told him. Rennie Rorshon…or Double R, as the town called him. Rennie was the local loony. Every town had one. They were usually people who no one really knew anything about, but over the years had invented stories about them and why they were so crazy until people believed them to be true. Usually, these stories consisted of a normal man who one day lost his whole family in an automobile accident or to a homicidal killer or to anything that could never be fully substantiated. More often than not, it was simply a case of someone who was already a little odd that took up drinking or cocaine or crack and merely enhanced their strangeness. Well, they didn’t miss ‘em this time. He found himself hoping that someone had the foresight to get Rennie out of the place before the storms came.
Kyler carefully waded through the ankle deep water until he reached the back of the town, which sloped back up. Thank God that they had the ocean for the water to drain back into, or else the whole place might’ve been completely covered in water.
He made his way uphill and walked to the back of Kleinaman’s Drug Store. The bottom half of the old brick building was all that was still standing. Daylight shone all the way through the place. He stuck his head inside and looked around. The place looked like it had been abandoned for twenty years, then suddenly caught fire one night, and was put out with fire hoses. The floor was covered with mud that had to have been three feet deep. The shelves that weren’t completely turned over were smashed into dozens of pieces. An old stool was turned upside down, its four legs sticking out of the mud like a couple of upside down synchronized swimmers. He saw several cans of ointments and creams lying on top of the mud. A Time magazine was half covered with mud and opened to a page that showed a picture of Chef Boy-Ar-Dee smiling on a can of “Beefoghetti”, his white mustache covered with brown goo. He looked up and saw that the round clock had stayed on the wall, its hands stopped at 3:11.
He started to step into the building to possibly retrieve something that he could use as first aid since most of the stuff in the pillowcase was filthy, but decided against it. He would’ve been in mud up to his knees, plus he doubted that there could be anything still salvageable in there.
He began to walk around to the front of the building, dodging power lines that he knew to be dead, but was still chicken-shit enough not to chance it. He made his way to the front of the building and stood on the sidewalk. He had never seen anything like it. Buildings that were there one day and gone the next, some with no indication that they ever stood, except for the building address that was painted on the sidewalk in front of it.
He slowly began to move down the sidewalk looking for any signs of life. He figured there had to be someone here somewhere. You always heard about some old local who stayed behind because they had survived hurricanes before only to find them dead six miles from their home entangled in their favorite rocking chair.
“Hello?” he called out, as he continued to tiptoe over the debris that littered the sidewalk. “Is anybody here?” No answer. “Hello?”
The one thing that Kyler took notice of was the fact that there must’ve been at least fifteen cars that had floated during the flooding and had rested against building walls or telephone poles that had survived the storm. In each and every case, the back of the car was sticking up in the air, while the front tires remained on the ground. It almost looked as if some giant hand had purposely placed them in those positions, because there was almost a uniformity to it. Maybe a giant child had crawled out from the sea and placed them ass up, so they couldn’t run away from him.
Kyler continued moving along what had once been sort of a boardwalk, not a real one, of course, but a close facsimile…something that small town folk called a boardwalk. The boards were wet, but almost all of them had stayed fastened down. There was a small gap where four or five boards were missing, but other than that, it was still intact.
There wasn’t much of a square left. No Name Hardware was gone. Sally’s Antiques was gone. Bubba Joe’s Seafood was gone…now that was a damn shame. He had eaten at Bubba Joe’s at least three days a week since his arrival on the island. The only reason he didn’t go every single day, was mainly out of the embarrassment of eating at the same place seven days a week. It had been hard enough to hold it to three.
The only two other buildings in the whole square seemed to have weathered the storm were Hosanna’s Christian books and Madam Fontenot’s palm reading. Kyler chuckled to himself. He found something funny about Christian books and a palm-reading salon being two of the only places that made it through pretty much unscathed. Only their windows were shattered…other than that, nothing. As he passed Madam Fontenot’s, he wondered if her Magic 8 Ball had told her to get the hell out of there.
Kyler walked out into the center of the square. As he gazed around the square, he couldn’t help but feel like the only s
urvivor of a nuclear holocaust movie like the “Omega Man” or “I am Legend”…which were both taken from the same book.
“Hello?” he cried out, long and loud. “Hello?” Once again…nothing.
He turned around and looked out at the ocean. He didn’t want to walk along the beach. There was just too much debris. He’d seen enough destruction, devastation, and dead bodies to last him a lifetime, but he also wanted to get the mud off of him before he went nuts. He could feel it drying and caking against his skin, pulling on his arm hairs as it did.
“Screw it,” he said aloud, throwing the pillowcase over his shoulder. He turned on his heels and walked toward the ocean to wash the mud off, wishing also that he could wash away the last two days off his life.
CHAPTER 42
He stood in front of what used to be the hospital. He knew that there was no one in there…they had all been evacuated, but there still might be something in there that he could use. Chances were slim, but not impossible.
The two front hospital doors were twisted, but still connected to the building. He cautiously stepped through them, not wanting to step in the mud that completely covered the lobby floor. He knew that he shouldn’t even be in a building whose top two floors had been blown away, because there could be bricks, tiles, or anything still on a ledge on the upper floors that could fall away at any moment.
As he stood still in the lobby, every memory from two nights ago completely flooded his brain. Nurse Walling, Mrs. Rogerson, her daughter Leanne Olsen, Burt and Martin Burns, snotty little Michael Blum, Shelly Dixon and her TWO babies, the naked model, and of course, the burn victim who turned into a werewolf. The hospital lobby silently spoke of all the changes that had taken place in the last two days. “See what can happen in just two days, Doc?” it seemed to say. “Best not fool with Mother Nature, eh?”
As he moved into the lobby, he stopped at the security desk. It looked more like a security desk in hell than it did a hospital’s. Just like everything else, it was covered in mud, muck, seaweed, and dirt. One camera monitor lay smashed on the floor while the other remained where it was only by the grace of two single cables that had somehow missed getting ripped out of the wall by the wind. It amazed him what the storm decided to smash and what it decided to leave alone. You always heard about tornados that would destroy complete towns except for Farmer Miller’s one hundred and thirty year old barn, which was so old and decrepit that it barely stood on its own even when the wind wasn’t blowing. Old Lay Nature was a puzzler that was for certain.
He tiptoed into the room adjacent to the lobby where he saw all of the bent and twisted hospital gurneys, some bent by the storm and others by the werewolf. He saw the IV bottle that had been in the burn victim’s arm, broken and lying on top of a muddy No Name Island telephone book. Kyler’s address book was bigger than No Name’s complete directory. He scanned the room, but once again, he couldn’t find anything salvageable.
As he began to move back into the lobby, something on the wall caught his attention. Right next to the light switch was a palm print…a palm print fashioned from blood. He wondered whose it had been. Leanne Olsen’s or maybe even the stranger’s himself. Hell, it might have even been his after he slipped in the large pool of blood and guts that had spilled from the werewolf’s first couple of victims.
He stepped out of the small waiting room and looked down the long, black hallway that the twenty of them had waded through. Believe it or not, it actually looked more ominous now than it had when they’d had to swim through it. Its cold silence seemed to beckon him. “Hey, there might be something down here,” it seemed to say. The more he looked down the lonely dark corridor, the smaller it seemed to get. He wasn’t particularly claustrophobic, but at that moment, he knew what those millions of people felt like who couldn’t get on elevators, travel by plane, or explore caves. He didn’t know a lot of things in this world, but he knew that he wasn’t going to walk down that hallway. He would check out the emergency room, and then get the hell out.
He trudged through the sludge trying to get to the emergency room. If there were anything useable, that would probably be the place to find it. As he started to put his foot down, he noticed that something was just under it. He peered down and saw that he was about to put his foot down on a dead cat. Like the horse he had seen earlier, the cat’s face was also frozen in its last moments of terror.
“You just drowned,” he wanted to tell the unfortunate feline. “There were worse deaths in here than yours, my friend. Consider yourself lucky.”
He stepped over the dead cat and put his foot on top of a desk that was buried in the mud. He put all of the weight on the desk that he could using the one leg, then stood on top of it, keeping one hand on the wall. He then stepped from the top of the desk to the top of a chair. Letting go of the wall, he quickly stepped from the top of the chair to a broken x-ray machine, and then he began to wobble. Starting to lose his balance, he stepped from the chair, to a turned over gurney, to another chair, back to the gurney, back to the chair, to a copier machine, to another gurney, back to the copier machine, and then…into the mud…face first, this time. He wanted to scream. He could smell and taste raw sewage. He stood up as fast as he could, only to find himself standing in mud up to his shins.
“Shit” he screamed at the top of his lungs. “Godamnmothufuckin…shit!”
He tried to wipe the muck from his face, but his hands were just as dirty as his face. He took a step forward and looked down at a broken mirror which now lay in the mud. He looked like one of those old vaudeville minstrels, which sang “Mammy” every three bars of the song, and rhymed it with words like “Sammy”, Alabamee”, and “Cook d’em eggs and hammy”. He tried to sling what mud he could from off of his hands, but he couldn’t get rid of the taste of raw sewage. Two days before, he had wrestled with floating corpses, but somehow, at the moment, this was worse.
He wanted to say, “screw it” to the emergency room, but since he was only four feet from it, and already covered in filth, he would go ahead. He could always take another dip in the ocean. He tried to take his first step, but the mud was pulling at him and making a sucking sound as he tried to remove his foot. He pulled as hard as he could and finally freed the appendage…without his shoe. He tried to reach down and retrieve it, but before he could, the hole closed over. He dug around with his hand for a moment, but couldn’t find it.
“That’s just great!” he screamed aloud.
He curled his toes as he tried to remove the other foot. He struggled, but the shoe stayed on. He took three more large strides trying to get into the emergency room, the process causing him to look not unlike a drunken scarecrow.
As he made his way into the emergency room, he was hit with the fact that his time had probably been wasted, because this room looked worse than the others. Fortunately, there was a shelf, which hadn’t been knocked over by the winds. On it sat bandages, some aspirin, some band-aids, and some cotton swabs. Great, he’d just gone through a room full of shitty mud and lost a shoe, to retrieve the exact same things that he had back at the bunker. He took the items from the shelf and made his way back through the waiting room, losing his other shoe on the return trip.
CHAPTER 43
It was 10:00 and still overcast, but it was obvious that the storm had passed, and Kyler doubted that there was a record third hurricane coming at them. He wanted to take another dip into the ocean, but he was barefoot now and didn’t want to risk stepping on plates, knives, broken bottles, or any assortment of things that always end up scattered on beaches after hurricanes. He would try to find a place on the way back, where the water was still high and try and get some of the mud off of him. At the very least, he would find a faucet inside the bunker and give himself some sort of bath. He was smitten with Zora and had definitely felt certain vibes coming from her, but he didn’t want whatever chemistry they had between them to be shot to hell because he smelled like pure, unadulterated shit.
He made his way
out of town, his eyes never leaving the ground, his tender feet causing him to tiptoe the whole way. He would stop every few minutes and look up to get his bearings, but other than that, he kept his eyes glued to the ground. He didn’t want to survive two hurricanes and a werewolf only to die, or at the least, lose his foot to some sort of staff infection, because he stepped on a nail, or some glass, or a jagged piece of pipe. He was going to look straight at the ground till he got back to the bunker.
He was relieved when he finally made it out of the town area, even though he continued to walk, head down. As he began to walk uphill, he noticed that he had taken a different path away from town than the one he’d taken to get there. He was walking up a dirt trail that looked like jeeps and land rovers drove over it from time to time. High weeds on both sides surrounded the track. Woods had surrounded it, but most of the trees had disappeared during the storm, leaving only a lucky few still standing. For a moment, he felt lost, but then spotted the original path he had taken a hundred or so yards to his left. He set the pillowcase down, then lifted one foot up and inspected the bottom of it for glass or anything sharp that might cause damage. The only thing he saw was gravel from the track stuck to his foot. He took his hand and wiped the tiny rocks off of his foot, and then did the same to the other one, before picking up the pillowcase, getting his bearings, and moving toward the bunker once again.
He had gotten no more than ten feet, when he heard a noise behind him. It was a rustling sound. He stopped for a moment, and turned his head so that his left ear was facing his back. He listened for a moment, but heard nothing. He took a deep breath, and then began walking again. He got no more than a few steps before he heard the rustling again…only faster this time. Something was definitely behind him and moving quickly. As he started to turn around, something slammed into his back, knocking the wind out of him. He heard himself involuntarily grunt as the air left his body.