FULL MOON ISLAND

by Terry Yates

  “The gun itself is quiet,” he said. “It’s the bullets that are loud.”

  The gunfire had awakened Kayla, who began to bawl.

  “Shhh…” he whispered to the child. He was trying to listen for the patter of tiny werewolf feet. He listened intently for at least a minute. Hearing none, he began to walk back up the stairs, hoping that neither the “Littlest Werewolf” nor the one that was moving down the stairs were behind him.

  The werewolf that had once been the long, leggy, voluptuous, and high voiced Samantha Gould, moved quietly down the dark staircase. She had fed on the old she two-legger with the lightning box and wanted more. The creature had found the opening that had been torn away by what smelled like several of her kind, and followed the winding, metal rocks downward.

  She had discovered their den, but did not enter. Instinct told her that she had not been invited. She had smelled a pup and possibly, a two-legger and a two-legger pup. She could tell by the smell of the rotting carcasses, that the pack had recently fed and fed well. She had wanted to go inside, but instinct also told her that if she was caught in a lair with one of their cubs, the others might attack and even kill her, so she had decided to move on for time being. Perhaps later, she could go back when the others were there and become one of them.

  She had heard the loud strange noises as she neared the bottom of the stairs, but did not bother to go back, because she had heard the pup yelp in pain, telling her that it was near the den, so she ignored it. Besides, for the time being, she needed to find a lair of her own. It needed to be dark and away from prying two-leggers who might try to hurt her during the day…when she was vulnerable.

  Gringo stood next to a solitary elevator and contemplated his next move. He held the cardkey in one hand and nervously played with it with the index finger of the other hand, causing it to make a clicking sound every time his fingernail tapped against it.

  “This is a dilemma, ain’t it, Old Gringo boy?” he said aloud. “What to do? Should I go as far down as this card will take me, or should I wait till tomorrow and check this and the hidden stairs out when I know that both places will be werewolf free?”

  His gut told him to wait till morning, but his greed told him to put the damn cardkey into the keypad and see what happens. Hey, who knew? Maybe this cardkey wouldn’t help him learn jackshit. Maybe it doesn’t do anything or go anywhere, so what was the harm in putting the card into the slot just to see what happened? Nothing, of course. What’s it gonna hurt? Who’s it gonna hurt? The answer: Nothing and no one.

  Gringo bent down and placed the cardkey into the slot and waited. Almost immediately, the elevator door opened up in front of him. With the doors open, the elevator didn’t look so inviting…it looked more like an open mouth pretending to be an elevator, until you stepped into it, then…bam! It closed its mighty jaws around you and chomped down hard.

  “What the hell…” he said. “Potts is watching the door and Samantha’s safely locked up. Just go down and see where this leads, then come back up again. Piece o’ cake.”

  Gringo timidly stepped in the elevator. He was looking at a blank wall. There were no buttons, only a thin slot. He put the cardkey into the slot and waited. After a moment, the doors began to close. Once they did, the elevator began going down.

  “Jesus, this must be one important card,” he said, looking at it as if were made of gold.

  He put the card in his breast pocket, and then put his arms down to his side. Normally, he would’ve either folded his arms or stuck his hands in his pockets, but he just didn’t feel that comfortable at the moment.

  “Christ, how far down does this thing go?” he asked himself after at least a full minute of riding the elevator.

  He’d hardly gotten the words out of his mouth, when he felt the car come to a stop. The doors opened almost immediately. Gringo poked his head out the doorway, and looked in both directions before stepping out of the elevator.

  It looked almost like the second floor inside a Marriott Hotel. The carpeted floor went in both directions, just like they did when your room was indoors. There were doors every couple of feet on each side of the elevator, and a balcony railing directly in front of him that traveled parallel with the floor. Across the way, he could see a mirror image of where he was, a single elevator across from him, and doors lining the walls on each side of the elevator. Just like a friggin’ Marriott Hotel. No, better than a Marriott Hotel. Conrad Marriott would shit in his pants if he saw this place.

  He stepped up to the railing and looked down, almost expecting to see a large solarium or terrace or a food court, or something. Instead, it looked like NASA control, except this place had to be almost half a city block in size. Only a few of the lights were on, which gave the place a ghostly aura. There was row after row of tables that circled around the room, each with computers and monitors every couple of feet. There were at least five hundred computers all together. In the middle, sat a large area where obviously the head honcho…or honchos…stood. It was higher than the rest of the room with a set of stairs climbing upward from each side. To Gringo, the room looked like one great big, gigantic eye. On the walls, were what looked to be like digital signs. They looked like scoreboards at a basketball game, but none of the bulbs were lit up.

  The vastness of the room was mind-boggling. It reminded him of the time Samantha had “finagled” a chance to meet Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band once when they were playing Madison Square Garden. By finagled, she had strutted her stuff in front of a couple of the crew, finally managing to get them to invite the two of them to the band’s sound-check, which they always did hours before the show. They had walked in and been floored by the sheer size of the place when it was empty. They had watched as the band played “Promised Land” as their sound-check song. They’d even got to meet the band afterwards. The Boss had been aloof, but nice, his mind on the business at hand. It was Little Steven Van Zandt, who had looked up at the statuesque Samantha and asked…”Are there any more like you at home?” For his part, Gringo had been eyeing the hot redheaded chick singer in the black, tight outfit. He had been just about to sidle over to her while Samantha was busy talking to a bunch of roadies, when he heard Springsteen ask her if she’d called the kids yet. Dammit! The bastard could have any chick in New York, but no…he had to be with the one that Gringo was after. Ah well, he had thought. Easy come. Easy go. He could always say that he lost her to Bruce Springsteen, and would probably believe it as time went on.

  “Hello?” Gringo called down timidly, leaning over the balcony railing. “Is anybody here?”

  He got the answer he was expecting, which was none. How do you get down there, he wondered to himself. It had to be twenty-five feet down, much too far down for him to simply drop down from the railing.

  He began to walk down the corridor, sliding his hand along the railing while he searched for some means to get himself down there. He’d gone no more than twenty feet, when he saw what looked to be a large stopped escalator that went from the ground floor to the far end of the second floor.

  “Bingo, Gringo!” he said, and began running toward the far side of the second floor.

  He could see it plainly now as he rounded the corner of the banister. It had been too dark to see it, but now he wondered how he could’ve missed it at all. A few more feet and it would be right in front of him.

  He made his way down the short side of the rectangular second floor, and stopped. There before him stood the escalator with at least sixty metal steps that went down into the large room. To Gringo, it looked like what the entrance to Hell might actually be like…an unusually wide escalator than went down into a vast, empty nothingness.

  “Hello?” he asked again. “Is anybody down there?”

  Getting the same silent answer that he’d gotten before, Gringo began to walk down the escalator, the metal steps echoing throughout the room as he did. He tried to picture the inhabitants milling about throughout the place. Was it like the New York Stoc
k Exchange, where it was loud and everyone was yelling and bells and buzzers were going off, or was it like one of those futuristic movies where everyone walks around like drones, silently doing the same thing all day long, without ever saying a word or even looking at one another? And where was the other escalator? Usually, there are two escalators side by side, one for up, and one for down…but there was only the one. Did it go down at the beginning of the day, and not go back up until the end of the day?

  As Gringo reached the bottom of the steps, he was doubly bowled over by the vastness of the room. It was even bigger than an empty Madison Square Garden. He bet Bruce and the boys never played an indoor arena this big.

  He stood at the bottom of the escalator for a moment, taking it all in. What in the shit went on down here? Gringo began to move around the room, running his hands along the immaculately clean tables, and looking at the computer monitors, which were all blank. He pulled up a chair at one of the tables and sat down. From his vantage point, he could see clearly, the spot where the head honcho stood and behind that, what looked like either a large screen or a window. He looked at both the computers and the monitors and found no trademark or company logos. You always saw words like “Apple” or “MacIntosh” or “Compaq” or something, but there were none to be seen anywhere. Hell, there weren’t even any buttons to push. The chairs were fairly comfortable, at least.

  Gringo got up from the chair and began to wander around the room. The walls were made out of the same white brick as the hallway corridors. They were blank, too. There were no signs, bulletin boards, softball signup sheets, nothing. There was absolutely nothing that would tell a stranger what went on in this room.

  As he came to the end of one wall, he noticed an open door. It was dark inside. Once again, he was cautious, still remembering Fat Anthony and the goons. Without even sticking his head inside the doorway, he could see that it was a stairwell. That was the first thing that had made sense to him since he’d entered the building. This room…the place where he stood…was the very bottom of the whole facility. His guess was that this staircase led up to that secret door he’d discovered left open. Well, at least he had a way out if the elevator didn’t open back up. Gringo had spent his entire childhood looking for ways out of possible scrapes. That’s why he was where he was and most of his pals were either dead or in jail.

  Gringo left the doorway and moved along the far wall looking for anything…any sign of what went on here. He wished that he had Sylvia’s camera. If Samantha hadn’t stepped on it, he would retrieve it tomorrow and get a few good snapshots from down here. He was beginning to get giddy again thinking about the untold fortune he and Samantha would have when they got back to the states.

  Halfway down the far wall, which was at least one hundred and fifty yards, Gringo saw something that caught his interest. There was something attached to the wall…something with a curtain draped over it. He began to walk faster toward the thing, hoping that he wasn’t just seeing a shadow under the dim lighting.

  When he reached the object, he found out that there was more than one of them. There were six to be exact…six cylindrical shaped objects that stood about eight or nine feet tall and were covered with some sort of curtain. Their shapes reminded Gringo of the drive-thru bank deposit tubes, or perhaps one of those little tubes that girls put their Barbie’s in after playing with them.

  “Now what could be under here?” he asked himself aloud, excited at the prospect of finally finding out what went on in this building…hell, on this whole island.

  He reached up and touched the curtain, half expecting it to shock him or paralyze him, or anything that would tell him that curiosity KO’d the feline. But nothing happened as he bunched the satin like curtain into his hand.

  “All right, Gringo,” he said aloud. “Let’s see what’s behind curtain Number One.”

  Gringo gave the curtain one hard tug, and then another, and still another before it finally gave way and fell to the floor, falling across his feet. Gringo was speechless as he looked up into the tube.

  “Uncrappin’ believable…”

  He let out a single laugh, but quickly covered his mouth, not so much because he was worried about being heard, but it almost seemed indecent to laugh in front of what stood before him. Everything that he’d ever seen, heard, or been taught, had just gone down the shitter. He moved down to the next one and tore away the curtain.

  “My God!” he exclaimed, smiling, before moving down to the next one…and then the next one…and the next one, until he had torn the curtains from all six of the tubes.

  He walked back to the center tube, and then stepped back so he could see them all at once.

  “I knew it!” he exclaimed. “I fuckin’ knew…”

  Before he could finish the sentence, something crashed into him from the side and sent him crashing to the floor where his head smacked hard against the tile. Something heavy was on top of him and rolling him over onto his back. Before he was completely on his back, something sharp raked across his face, knocking his left eye from its socket, and tearing away most of his cheek and jaw. He felt a pair of razor sharp teeth bite into his chest and pull a large portion of his right breast away. He was too stunned to scream or yell. He felt a claw swipe at the right side of his face, pulling most of that cheek away, too. His mouth began to fill with blood. The thing was straddling him, almost crushing his chest. The creature began to strike at him with both sets of claws, pummeling him into a mass of flesh, bone, and blood. One blow struck him in the chin, nearly severing it from his face, and the next tore most of his nose off.

  After a few more swipes, it stopped. Probably needs a rest, Gringo thought to himself, feeling his chest about to cave in. He could hear the beast panting and could feel its hot breath blowing against his face, which burned hot, but was slowly cooling due to shock or the onset of death.

  Gringo open his right eye and looked up into the werewolf’s face. Bits of himself were hanging from the monster’s mouth. He watched it swallow what had been the right side of his chest, and then lick its chops as if had just eaten a t-bone steak. The creature’s own chest was heaving in and out and now, instead of panting, it was grunting. The bright yellow eyes stared back at him with murder written all over them. As murderous as they were, he could see that the thing looked at him almost like it knew him.

  Gringo felt the blood dripping down both sides of what was left of his face as he continued to stare up at the werewolf that he knew had once been his Samantha. She lifted her nose into the air and gave a loud and long howl, which echoed loudly throughout the whole control center, before finally turning her attention back to Gringo, who was now cold and fading into darkness. The thing growled at him as it opened its mouth as wide as it could.

  “I guess you would kill your Gringo Dingo,” he said, forcing a weak smile, before the beast tore into his throat.

  Zack Olsen had looked everywhere on the twelfth floor for his father, but couldn’t find him. It made no sense. He couldn’t have just disappeared. He wasn’t capable of finding his way to another floor. He had to be here somewhere. Time was running out. He’d heard a werewolf howl and then a woman scream, so he knew that there was one loose on the floor somewhere. The gun had been in his hand and cocked since he had heard them. He wondered who it was…which of the others had become the thing’s next victim? Which one of them wouldn’t make it off of this island?

  Zack ran toward the far west side of the twelfth floor, because it was the only place he hadn’t checked thoroughly, and it was in completely the opposite direction of the werewolf. He wanted to put as much distance as he could between himself and the beast. Maybe his father would be there and maybe they could find a cubbyhole somewhere to hole up in till morning.

  He rounded one corner, and then another. Where was his father? Where was anybody? He began to sprint down a long hallway that dead-ended into another hallway. As he reached the dead end, he looked both ways. Right would take him farther away. Turning ri
ght, he began to run again. Up ahead, on the right side of the hallway, he saw something moving. Zack stopped dead in his tracks, his heart racing. As he tried to catch his breath, he watched the figure. He wanted to cry as soon as he realized that it was his father leaning against the hall wall. He put the pistol away as he ran toward his father.

  As he reached him, he almost expected Rob to say…”Why hello, Zack! Where’ve you been?” But instead, he just leaned against the wall, both his eyes and his mouth wide open.

  “There you are,” Zack said, taking his father gently by the shoulders. “How did you get way down here?”

  Rob remained mute and there was no real sign of life in his eyes. It looked to Zack as if his father was looking right through him. He didn’t care though. He would take him as he was, right now. He couldn’t remain in that state forever. There’d be doctors and psychiatrists that would be able to help him. He’d be good as new as soon as he could get him off of this island.

  It was too dangerous to take him back to the sleeping quarters. He needed to find a place for them to hide till morning. Zack took Rob’s arm and began to slowly walk him back down the corridor, checking every door that they passed. They would go into the first unlocked one that they came across and wait it out.

  He’d only been able to check three doors before he noticed something move at the opposite end of the long hallway.

  “Oh shit…” he said softly, fear beginning to take over his entire body.

  At the end of the hallway, stood three werewolves…and they were huge. They stood on their hind legs, the larger standing in front of the other two. The leader snarled lowly, the other two quickly following suit.

  Zack slowly retrieved the pistol from the back of his pants, and held it out in front of him, the barrel pointed at the beasts. Even though they were at least a hundred feet away from him, Zack could see something dripping from the leader’s claws. Blood. Small pools of it were forming on each side of the beast.