by Terry Yates
Zora led him from hallway to hallway, him calling for her the whole time. Once she felt that she had led him far enough away, she began to double back and make her way back to the sleeping quarters. If Gringo was anything like she guessed he was, he would keep looking for her for at least a good twenty to thirty minutes.
When she got back to the sleeping quarters, they had subdued Samantha and gagged her, not allowing her to scream for Gringo, but more importantly not allowing her to bite them. Zack Olsen helped them drag her down the hallway and into the commissary, where they took her to the kitchen. She was growling like an animal through the gag, but she was having trouble moving, because they had taken a chain that Sam had found in a storage room and wrapped it tightly around her, pinning her arms at her side.
Once in the kitchen, Zora opened the cooler door, and they dragged Samantha into it just as Sylvia Morrison showed up, breathing heavily and trying to focus her eyes on the group.
“You can’t do this!” she screamed, moving toward the group, but Sgt. Cohen caught her by the arm and held her fast.
“Why are you doing this!” she shouted.
“Precaution,” Potts answered, not looking up. He had straddled her lap while wrapping a second chain around her, and trying to fit a small padlock through several of the links and fastening it tight. “There,” he said. “Sorry about this, Miss Gould, but, with what happened to Miss Munn, we can’t leave you untethered.”
“Untethered!” Sylvia yelled at him. “This is indecent! She’s not going to hurt anyone!”
“It just took six of us to subdue her, Ma’am, just like it did with Klefka.”
Potts got off of Samantha’s lap and checked the chain, which was as snug as he could possibly make it.
There,” he said trying to regain his breath. He looked down at Samantha who was giving him a murderous glare. He just then noticed the change in her eyes. The irises were larger now…and brown, which he was pretty sure they hadn’t been before.
“You can’t leave me in here! I’ll freeze to death!” Samantha squealed, trying to sound completely helpless now, the rage disappearing from her eyes. She had even managed to soften her eyes as she pleaded with the colonel. Potts was having none of it. She might be as hot as Satan’s balls in August, but for right now, she was the enemy, and no amount of charm or helpless banter was going to sway him from the job at hand.
“I’m going to kill you,” she suddenly hissed at him, her eyes instantly changing back to murderous mode.
“Not for a while,” he answered coolly back at her. “Miss LeMarque, could you turn the thermostat off, please?”
Zora nodded and walked over to the thermostat, which was more of a dial with numbers marked one through ten on it. She turned the dial to zero.
“Won’t the food spoil?” Zack asked.
“Ask Mr. Fong there, Son,” Potts replied. “If I heard correctly, his family was in the restaurant business for a while. How ‘bout it, Fong? Will they last through the night?”
“I doubt much will spoil,” he answered, rubbing his chin. “Some of the perishables might, but my guess is that everything should be okay. It’s cold enough in here that it might take a full day to thaw some of these meats. Besides, if it did ruin them, there’s still plenty of canned foods to last a long time.”
“There you go, Son,” Potts said to Zack. “Besides, if we don’t secure her, we might end up being the food ourselves. Now, who has the key to the locks?”
Sam reached into his pocket and retrieved a small key, and then tossed it to Potts, who stuffed it in his pants pocket.
“Sorry again, Miss Gould,” he said, looking down at her, “but we’ve only got about an hour and a half of daylight left, and I can’t spare a man to guard you.”
“This isn’t right!” Sylvia screamed again, this time breaking into tears.
“Son, would you escort the lady back to the bivouac room for us?” he asked Zack, who quietly nodded, and gently took the crying lady by the shoulders and led her out of the freezer.
Potts could see that his soldiers were uncomfortable leaving Samantha in that cold room.
“She’ll survive. This isn’t a sealed room. She’ll be able to breathe. Besides, we don’t have a choice,” he told them. “Until morning, she is the enemy. Fong, I need you and Miss LeMarque to go back and help the O’Hearleys make the rest of the bullets. Time is short and we need everyone’s help right now.”
“What about Gringo?” Sam asked. “He’s going to be furious.”
“I’m not so sure,” Potts replied. “From what I’ve seen, he looks like the kind of man who looks at things in black and white. If she’s a danger to him, he’s not going to let her out, but I suppose someone will need to tell him. Miss LeMarque, do you have any idea where he might be right now?”
“He could be anywhere at this point,” Zora answered, remembering the lustful way he chased her down the hall.
“I could find him on one of the security monitors,” Sam told him.
“No time,” Potts shot back, shaking his head.
“You can’t do this to me,” Samantha whimpered, tears welling up in her eyes.
Potts had been with enough prisoners in his long career not to be fooled by crocodile tears.
“Lady, by rights I should cut your head off right here and now and be done with it, but…”
“You can’t,” FranAnne interrupted, knowing that Potts, in his own odd way had succumbed to the same problem that Dr. Kyler had faced. It was easier to kill a monster than it was to kill someone who was helpless to defend himself.
“Fulton, you’re already on my shit list for not coming to me first when you found the old lady, but for now, I’m letting it slide. Now, you three meet me at the front door, and be loaded for bear. Got it?”
Cohen, Hawkins, and FranAnne saluted and left the room. As Potts turned to walk away, he heard the clicking of teeth and felt a small pain in his hand. He immediately jumped backwards away from Samantha. She had tried to bite him…or had bitten him. He looked down at his hand to find that there was a small tearing of skin on the side of his hand, but the hand itself hadn’t been penetrated. She had missed penetrating the skin by a fraction of an inch. He breathed a sigh of relief, and then looked down at the woman, who was smiling back up at him with the most contemptuous smile that he had ever seen. Abby Walling’s sneers had nothing on Samantha Gould’s.
“Almost gotcha,” she giggled up at him.
“If you had, I would’ve cut your head off.”
“But then, you’d become what I am, too,” she hissed back up at him.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he retorted. “Believe me.”
With this, he motioned for Zora and Sam to leave, without taking his eyes off of her.
“I’m still going to kill you,” she told him as he backed away from her, then turned and walked out of the freezer. “I’m going to kill you!” she screamed, her voice rising in anger. “I’m going to kill you!”
“Get in line,” he said softly, as he closed the freezer door.
CHAPTER 70
Kyler had been left alone in the laboratory. Only Lauren and Joe remained. Lauren sat next to him as he had tried to regain his breath.
“Sorry, you had to see all of that,” he told her, expecting her to give him the silent treatment like the others.
“It’s okay, Doctor Kyler,” she told him. “I’ve seen worse than that in the last four days.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet you’ve seen enough to last you for a couple of years, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” she nodded, “although I’ve been privy to a whole new world of scientific discovery. I’ve found out that werewolves are real. I can’t wait to tell my classmates.”
Kyler smiled at her. She would probably really catch it at school if she tried to explain the fun little weekend that she’d had. If Potts was right, everything that happened on the island would be hushed up quicker than Roswell.
“I understand why you did what you
did,” Lauren told him.
“Oh yeah,” he answered quickly. “Then maybe you can explain it to me.”
“It’s simple,” she replied. “You’re a good person.”
Kyler wanted to laugh. She was sounding like Nicholas Klefka now.
“How many good people do you know that get beaten for doing what they feel is the right thing?”
“Lots,” she told him, looking him in the face. “There was Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Jesus…and Josh Wellford.”
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he had stopped her. “You’re putting me up there with some really heavy hitters…and who the heck is Josh Wellford?”
“He’s an older boy at school who took up for me once when some girls knocked my books out of my hand and wouldn’t give them back to me. He also fought three boys one time who were calling me names.”
Kyler found himself becoming angry at anyone who would hurt this special child.
“He must’ve got picked on a lot when he was your age,” he told her.
“I doubt that,” she came back quickly. “He’s one of the popular boys.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. He’s just like you. He does what he feels is the right thing…just like you do.”
Kyler blushed. “So, you and Josh are buddies, huh?”
“Not at all. He hardly talks to me. He just doesn’t like seeing someone smaller or different, being picked on.”
God bless Josh Wellford, he thought to himself.
“Like I said, he’s a lot like you.”
“Well, I think the others might disagree with you.”
“Let them,” she said. “I think I know you better than they do.”
“Oh you do, do you?”
“Yes. You helped that man because he was hurt, the same way you stood up for Joe when Colonel Potts was talking about killing him for his saliva glands.”
“I sure could’ve used him when Potts was twisting my arm,” he told her.
“He was growling, but I held him back. He was too weak to be of much help, and I was scared that Col. Potts might shoot him.”
“Good thinking.”
“No, Joe and I both are big fans of yours. Aren’t we, Joe?”
With this, she clapped her hands and called for the dog, who bounded off of the couch, stumbling at first from the heat exhaustion and loss of blood, but quickly righted himself and pranced over to where Kyler and Lauren sat. He happily squeezed himself between them and gave Lauren a sloppy lick across the nose before turning his attention to Kyler, where he attempted to do the same thing. It could be worse, he thought to himself trying to fight off Joe’s advances, without much success. His only two friends in the world it seemed were an eleven-year-old genius and a werewolf killing dog. Who could ask for more?
He needed to leave. He knew that it would be uncomfortable for all of them if the rest of them came back and found him there, so he checked Lauren’s temperature, and her stitches, and then checked Joe’s stitches.
“Well, both my patients seem to be doing fine,” he said, looking down at his last two friends on Earth.
Lauren put her arms around his waist and hugged him tightly. He kissed the top of her head and pulled her away from him.
“Don’t ever change, Sweetie,” he told her. “Don’t ever quit being exactly as you are now.”
He put his hand under her chin and walked out of the lab.
When he had entered the sleeping quarters, he had fully expected to be booed or jeered at, but he received no such ovation. The place was empty except for Michael Blum who had run out of tokens and had limped back from the arcade alone, Sylvia Morrison who was sobbing quietly, and Shelly, who had a crying Kayla in her lap. Where Michael smiled at him, and Sylvia didn’t see him, Shelly, on the other hand almost sneered when he entered the room. She’d probably heard the news about the building’s new Benedict Arnold, but he couldn’t tell with Shelly. She might still be mad at him for helping drag her back last night. At that moment though, he didn’t care. He simply walked over to his cot and lay down on it, curling up on his side, and closing his eyes.
He must’ve dozed off, because it seemed only a few seconds after he lay down, that someone was shaking his sore shoulder.
“Doc! Hey, Doc!”
It was Gringo.
“Hey, Doc!”
Kyler turned over and looked at the man, who was standing over him, shirtless and hairy, part of his bandage hanging off.
“Is something wrong, Gringo?” he asked, sitting up.
“Shit yeah, there is,” Gringo answered, plopping down on the end of the cot and staring straight ahead for a moment. He looked confused.
“What is it?” Kyler asked.
“It’s that Zola chick of yours,” he said, looking over at him.
“It’s Zora, and believe me, she not mi…”
“That bitch stands in that doorway, gives me this…”I want you to pound me into pulp” look…and then runs away. Just like that!” he said, snapping his fingers.
“I’m sorry, but…”
“And then Sylvia tells me that she was just luring me away, so they could grab Samantha and throw her in the meat locker.”
“What? What about Samantha and a meat locker?”
“Potts and the others lured me away and then nabbed Samantha.”
Kyler was shocked at the man’s calmness.
“Why did they put her in a meat locker?” Kyler asked the man, trying to feign innocence. He, in fact, had been the one to warn the others about Samantha’s possible full moon activities. He was also trying not to stare at enough hair that would make King Kong green with envy.
“Sylvia told me that they thought that she might turn into…well…a werewolf tonight.”
“You don’t say?” he replied, still feigning shock and surprise, but not having much luck.”
“I still can’t believe it,” Gringo said, staring ahead once again.
“Well, I’m sure it was for her own…”
“Not Samantha, Doc. Zola! Why couldn’t she have just told me what they were gonna do? I would’ve understood”
“And you would’ve stood by and let them?”
“Hell, I might’ve helped them. I don’t want her turning into one of those things anymore than anyone else does. If it’s best for everyone if she’s locked in a cupboard, then she’ll just have to be locked in a cupboard.”
Kyler felt worse now than ever. Even Gringo, the most self-centered man he’d ever met was agreeing that the needs of the many were greater than the needs of the one.
“Well, I better go check on her,” Kyler said. He started to get up, but Gringo put his hand on his shoulder and forced him back down.”
“Nah, that’s alright, Doc. I’m about to go down there myself and check on her. Besides, from what I’ve heard, you need to take it easy for a while.”
“What do you mean?”
“I heard Potts worked you over pretty good for not killin’ that son-of-a-bitch when you had the chance.”
“Who told you this?”
“Hell, everybody knows.”
“Great.”
“That took some balls, Doc, you know…not giving the man up when you shoulda. You must carry your balls around in a big freekin’ wheelbarrow, my friend.”
There he went again. Gringo Boots, the walking, talking, contradiction. Just when you thought you knew him…thwack! You found out you didn’t.
“Do you want me to go down there with you?” Kyler asked, suddenly liking the man again.
“No, I was gonna take me a cold shower, and head down there, but if you wouldn’t mind helping Sylvia out a little, I’d appreciate it. The old broad’s bent out of shape about them putting Samantha away.”
“Sure.”
Gringo stood up.
“That Zola’s one hot piece o’ woman, ain’t she?”
With this, he walked over to his cot, grabbed a shirt and put it on, and then went over to Sylvia, placed a hand on her shoulder, and said some
thing that Kyler couldn’t hear. He saw the old photographer nod her head slowly, never looking up into his eyes. Gringo then grabbed a towel off his cot, saluted Michael Blum, who smiled back at him, and was out the door.
Kyler stood up and thought about Zora for a moment. He had really expected her to understand the situation he had been put in, but he had guessed wrong. She had dropped him like a bad habit. Nothing worse than disappointing a woman, he supposed. He had been smitten with her. She was smart, mysterious, wily, and now he found out…cunning. Boy, if they didn’t get rescued, there were going to be some awkward days around here. He hadn’t even gotten to know her well enough to find out what she really did for a living. She’d told them that she was a scientist, but he never found out what field of science she worked in. Guess he never would now.
He walked over to Michael Blum’s cot. Michael was reading a gothic novel that some illiterate had left lying around before they evacuated.
“Misty Dawn,” Kyler said aloud, looking at the cover. “Is it good?” he asked the boy.
“It’s stupid,” Michael replied, putting the book down on his chest.
“It used to be a soap opera, you know,” Kyler told him.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah…in the sixties. It had a vampire and an evil oil baron.”
“Was it any good?” Michael asked him.
“Nah, it was a stupid soap opera…if that’s not an oxy-moron.”
Kyler sat on at the foot of the boy’s bed.
“Leg hurting?” he asked him.