Everyone's Dead But Us

by Zubro, Mark Richard

  McCue said, “Movado’s guard came by this afternoon. He assured us everything was going to be okay. We ate a few leftovers here for breakfast. With the electricity out we couldn’t warm anything up. We lit a fire and read books by its light while it poured rain. We hadn’t had a need to go out yet. Where is there to go? Everything you need is here. We were waiting for the help to return.”

  Seymour added, “When we got back after helping with Thasos, we went back to bed and had sex.”

  I asked, “What secrets does that treasure room hold that keeps you all silent? Is that stuff all real? You’re all willing to die for it?”

  “There is no such room,” Seymour said.

  “Nope, sorry,” Scott said. “It’s real. We’ve seen it. Wouldn’t it be easier to tell us the truth?”

  “Easier for whom?” Seymour asked. “Eventually we will be in contact with the rest of the world. This storm is not going to last forever.”

  Scott said, “It only has to last until we’re all dead.”

  They clammed up. We’d done as much bullying as I could stomach for the day. I preferred reason to violence. Usually. But when the corpses were piling up, I tended to get a trifle short-tempered. We got out of there before I got even more tempted to add to the murder count. We left by the door on the opposite side of the villa from the road down which the pedicar had careened. As we were discovering, the villas dotting the slope up to the headland all had a connecting link to the parapet.

  Scott said, “I wonder if it would help if we put up a neon sign out here that said, Do Them Next.”

  “The electricity is out.”

  “Maybe we could write it on chalk on the wall.”

  “Would the killer find it soon enough? The rain might wash it away.”

  “Indelible Magic Marker?”

  “As long as he finds them before he finds us.”

  “Got that right, but being out here gives the killer another shot at us.”

  Night had long since fallen. The rain continued to pummel the earth. I said, “He’s got to see us first. I’m exhausted. We’ve got to get somewhere where we can sleep. Either that or I need a gallon or two of coffee. How are your arms and your head?”

  “I feel like I could swallow about ten aspirins. The arms hurt like hell.”

  “I had the all-in-one travel fix-it medical ointment in my bag.” My mother had insisted I carry the thing. In all our travels I’d never needed it once. I know what my mother would say at this point. See, it’s a good thing I gave it to you. It came in handy. Yeah, once in a lifetime. And it had been blown up with all our other luggage in the destruction of the castle. Not quite handy enough. We were mostly shielded from the rain as we stood half hidden in a declivity between the villa and a narrow stairway that led up to the top of the parapet.

  “We’ve got to go somewhere,” I said. “I still need to know more about these people. Although the more I find out, the more wretched they seem.”

  “I’m not sure they’re all wretched so much as pathetic.”

  “If you’re this rich, you don’t get to even join the pathetic Olympics. They can buy their way out of pathetic. They don’t mint enough money on the planet to buy their way out of wretched.”

  “Which leaves aside the question of where the hell we are supposed to go next. We don’t trust anybody on the island, do we?”

  “No.”

  “Do we hang out with those we’ve known the longest? Do we try to find a place to hide in? The cavern is still open. Or we could sneak into one of the vacant villas.”

  “Presuming we could get into one without being seen.”

  Scott asked, “Why did the killer put Henry Tudor in our room?”

  I said, “While we’re asking questions, how about this one? Why not wait and kill us along with him? Why leave us alive? He was obviously in our rooms. They aren’t hard to sneak into, but they are designed for privacy.”

  Scott looked at the stairs then back at the villa. “Which way?” he asked.

  “The killer was up the road. There aren’t more than a few more steps for us to get to the top of the hill and away. Or maybe he left.”

  Fat chance. The rain pummeled the earth as hard as it ever had. There wasn’t as much thunder and lightning as at the opening of the storm. Our yellow slickers were not the best cover in the world at this point. Toss them and get soaked or wear them and get dead?

  We came level with the parapet. Feeble as the light now was, we didn’t dare turn on the flashlight. Through the darkness and the storm, we saw nothing. The door we’d just exited began to slowly creep open. Had they come to their senses? Lightning flashed in the distance. I saw light glinting off the muzzle of a gun. It was turning toward us.

  “Run,” I yelled.

  The answer to the fleeting notion that maybe it was a person on our side being careful, was given seconds later as shots rang out. Through the darkness we ran straight inland. You couldn’t get that lost. It was a small island. I thought we couldn’t get much wetter, but the pathless land was miserable. We were soon as dirty as on our little excursion to the castle, but this was much worse. With the castle at least we could see a realizable goal in the illumination from the occasional burst of lightning. Here there were no landmarks. We were quickly too far from any villa even if we made the choice to enter one and get trapped inside. We were also now at the highest point on the land around us. Lightning could find us at any moment. We huddled close to the ground. It was far too dark and stormy to discern any path across the island. What might have been a path was now thousands of tiny rivulets. We were soaked and filthy I hoped we weren’t simply going in circles.

  The wind had shifted. It had been from the east. Now it was blasting from the south. Just in time to be in our faces. We slogged forward. Scott asked, “Where are we slogging to?”

  “Shelter,” I said. “Any kind of shelter. We’ve got to get out of this and under some kind of cover.”

  We came to the southern tip of the island. Waves crashed from the south into the curve of cliffs. We went west following the path that clung to the perimeter of the island. Doing this, we would eventually come to the cavern.

  At each point where the path dipped, the surf crashed across our way. What had been pleasant paths with occasional puffs of spray on our daily runs was now a continuous series of roiling breakers ready to sweep us into the sea. We timed our dashes carefully. I thought we might have been nearing the cavern when we came to a gap in the path where we couldn’t see the other side. The cliff face was far above our heads on the right. I touched the rock and earth there. I found no foothold or handholds that would help us climb.

  Scott asked, “Do we try to get back up to the pathless track above?”

  Ahead of us a wave receded leaving puddles, but a definite, clear way. I thought I saw the far side that rose above the pounding surf.

  “If the tide is coming in we might not be able to get back either. We came across some pretty narrow spots.”

  Scott pointed. “It doesn’t seem that far across.” Another wave rushed forward. It seemed to be higher and stronger than the last. The tide or random chance?

  “We can’t stay here,” I said.

  The wave receded and the far side was clear of water.

  Scott said, “Let’s wait for one more. If the tide is coming in, we can’t wait much longer.”

  We waited for one more wave. Perhaps not as high as the last. As it receded, we dashed forward. I felt the water tugging at my legs, but I kept my balance. We’d gone about ten feet when I realized the far side, where the path rose, was not a path up to dry land. We were in the low middle of a Sex and A new wave was coming. We ran.

  I couldn’t remember the intricacies of the island’s path. It wasn’t a familiar running path through a friendly woods. I wasn’t sure if we’d make it or not.

  We struggled up the slight rise, but we couldn’t stay there. We’d be swept away. We dashed pell-mell down, across, and toward the last rise of the
Sex and If it was a continuously undulating Sex and we were dead.

  Scott was ahead of me. The wave caught us full force before we reached the far side. I saw that the path about ten feet from me was above the waves. It might as well have been ten million feet. I felt myself being lifted toward the cliff face. I had to fight off being slammed against it. Then the water was receding, taking me with it.

  I swam with all my might. I had no purchase on land. I felt the water sucking me away. I flailed and kicked. What flashed in my mind was that I loved Scott. I might lose him. I might die in the sea in the next few moments.

  I flailed again. I felt Scott’s hand grab me. He pulled against the tide. The water receded. I was flat on my stomach kicking toward land.

  Scott had one arm wrapped around the last rocky outcropping. He pulled me to him. We had to scramble more before the next wave hit. We rushed—five, ten feet. I felt the next wave rushing in, but my feet touched land. The path began to rise. We fled upward.

  At the top we held each other. I felt Scott’s wet face and bristly five o’clock shadow. We huddled together. I told him I loved him. He held me and told me he loved me. And that was enough. I’d never been more exhausted. We stayed in each other’s arms for moments of blissful eternity.

  But it was still pouring rain, and we were both totally soaked. What had escaped dampening from the rain under my slicker was now soaked as well. My wallet and its contents were gone. Getting a new driver’s license when we got back would be a luxury compared to all this. The flashlight was dead. My gun was gone. So was his. We were alive but not by much.

  In the midst of the rain I turned, pitched the flashlight as far as I could into the sea, and raged against the sea, and the spray, and the waves, and the storm. They didn’t seem to much care, but I felt better for a few seconds of bellowing self-pitying words of fury.

  We had to go forward. We marched on the path toward the cavern. At intervals spray from the crashing waves still pummeled us. None came as close as our brush with the deep. Just before we got to the turn for the cavern, we leapt across a sharp declivity. A wave smashed into the rocks. It knocked us both into the opposite cliff face. Wordlessly we pressed on. Lightning was all we had to see by. We used our hands to feel the wet rock on our right as we struggled forward. The cavern entrance was on a slight rise beyond the path.

  We inched forward. “We should have found it by now,” I muttered.

  Scott said, “I think I feel it.” In the blackness I felt his presence more than saw him. Then he was gone.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in,” he said. A hand grabbed my right arm. He pulled me to him.

  We headed to the rear out of the wind and rain.

  I glanced at the luminous readout on my watch. I said, “It’s going to be midnight in just a few hours.”

  “Happy New Year?” he said.

  I wasn’t a big party hat kind of guy but I’d give a great deal for a dry one right now.

  I said, “I hate to begin a year with dead bodies piling up around us.”

  “They aren’t around us. We’re just close to a lot of them. Sure, we’ve got bodies plopping into our path, so to speak, but we’ve dealt with this kind of thing before.”

  “Not this many kerplops.”

  I glanced around the outcropping back at the entrance to the cavern. I heard dripping. The smoke hole faced away from the prevailing winds of the storm, but moisture had managed to collect around or above it and was making its way to the lip and falling in at regular intervals. A small pool was forming near the back of the cavern. All our blankets, pillows, and paraphernalia from earlier were still here. Certainly none of the staff would have had an opportunity to come and clean. Scott still had his matches from earlier, but they were soaking wet. Even if they weren’t, we dared not risk a light for fear that the glow would escape and hostile eyes might espy our location.

  “At least it’s not raining in here,” I said.

  “Give it time,” Scott said. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.”

  “Not by a long shot. We haven’t had an earthquake or a volcanic eruption.”

  “We’re in the right part of the world.”

  There was nothing to eat. At the moment nothing seemed appetizing. I just wanted to be in my own home far away from here. It was dark, and it was going to be dark for a long time. I took off my poncho and stepped around the outcropping and shook the rain off. I took Scott’s and shook it out as well.

  “We staying here all night?” he asked.

  “I don’t have a better idea. We could go back to the inhabited portions of the island, but I don’t relish following either path in the total dark. Without the storm, okay. Without the killer, I’d give it whirl. Not now. Presumably, nobody knows where we are.”

  “They might think we’ve been killed.”

  “That might actually be good, but nobody’s seen us topple off a cliff. Even if we were the killer’s target, we still have no idea why.”

  We took off our wet clothes, wrung them out, and placed them on rocky outcroppings to dry. We arranged the blankets under the ponchos and around ourselves as best we could. We settled onto the floor with our backs against the cavern wall. Some of the pillows we used as cushions against the stone floor, others we propped around us to help keep out the cold. We huddled together under the mound.

  When we were about as comfortable as we were going to get, Scott asked, “Who’s killing all these people and why?”

  “Money?” I opined. “There is all that artwork.”

  “But whose are those actually? And besides, they all have plenty of cash.”

  “Somebody always wants more.”

  “So the acquisitive impulse strikes again?”

  “It’s very human.”

  “I know it’s human, but it doesn’t seem to explain enough in this case.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I gave it whirl. You try.”

  “What the hell is the Israeli agent doing here?” Scott asked. “Maybe Craveté was actually right about something. Maybe there were terrorist threats and he is part of their protection.”

  “Not a hell of a lot of protection.”

  “He’s an inadequate agent. They can’t all be gems.”

  Scott said, “Maybe these people pissed somebody off.”

  “Good, but who? And you’ve got an awful lot of different people dead. They come from different countries and have different backgrounds. And there’s a lot of innocent people dead. All the hired help and the guards don’t strike me as good material for revenge. And they busted up a chunk of the island. What for? The Atrium and a third of the castle are history.”

  “Okay, if it’s not revenge and it’s not money, what is it?”

  “True believers?” I said.

  “Anticapitalists run amok?” he asked. “The religious right destroying an enclave of hedonism?”

  “Well, there’re lots of fanatics in the world.”

  “An antigay conspiracy,” he said. “It’s not enough to pass amendments in the U.S., the senators have directed the CIA to attack us here?”

  “As conspiracy theories go,” I said, “that one sounds a little weak.”

  A number of gay people had begun fleeing the United States after the Republicans pushed for the antigay marriage amendment in the Senate. Further driving them out was their dismay over the tacit approval of even more people who thought that though it might not be okay for the United States Constitution to embody discrimination, it was certainly okay for various state constitutions to embody discrimination. Those who left said basically, that any gay person who supported the Republicans was the same as a Jew supporting the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s. They said they were leaving before the rounding up could begin. They said that the Jews should have started leaving in the early thirties before it was too late.

  I said, “With luck the killer might think we’re still armed and extreme care or an ambush would be necessary.”

&nb
sp; He said, “I hope so.”

  Scott snuggled closer to me. I felt him shiver.

  “How’s your head?” I asked.

  “It hurts like hell. I’ve got a New Year’s Eve hangover without any of the booze.” Neither of us indulged much in alcohol, maybe a beer or two at my sister’s family barbecue every summer, but not much more than that. Chocolate, on the other hand, was an addiction for both of us.

  I said, “We’ve got to try and get some sleep. I don’t think the killer knows where we are. I am exhausted. We didn’t sleep last night. We’ve been moving all day.”

  “We’re not going to figure this out,” he said. “Not without more information.” I felt his cheek next to mine. “We should try to sleep.”

  I’d begun to shiver as well. I snuggled closer to Scott. I didn’t know if I’d ever feel dry or warm again. I didn’t think I could possibly fall asleep. The storm raged outside, but we weren’t in it. The surf pounded, but we only had to listen to its dim echoes. And Scott was breathing softly, and that was a comfort. “I love you,” he murmured.

  I found that I could sleep after all. I fell asleep listening to the raindrops plunking on the cement floor behind us.

  It was the waking that was the problem.

  It must have been near dawn when I awakened. Dim light leaked into our refuge. The smoke hole had an aura of deeply shadowed gray about it. I felt every lump or fissure of every rock, stone, or pebble underneath me. I remembered waking during the night in darkness and feeling Scott near me and taking some comfort from that. I must have tossed and turned. I might have had worse nights’ sleep, but I couldn’t remember when. I shivered in the predawn. I glanced at my watch. Just after seven. Scott’s arm was around me. I had to piss. I reached toward my not-as-wet-as-they-were clothes. I’d have given a great deal for a warm fluffy towel straight from the drier. I touched damp and shivery instead.

  As I began to pull myself up and while still reaching, I looked toward the cavern entrance. I saw a shadow. I froze. My heart began to pound. A man? A trick of the light? I’d never been in the cavern at dawn. We hadn’t set a watch. Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! If it was the killer, I’d have a very short time to wallow in the guilt of our stupidity at not setting a watch. Was the movement that caused the shadow what had wakened me? No voice came out of the gloom. Perhaps it was just a shadow. It remained motionless. Was I going to be killed because of an overwhelming, paralytic fear? Not while I drew breath. I would do what I could to save Scott and myself. I looked at him. Scott can sleep through just about anything. As soundlessly as possible, I eased over to the cavern wall. The shadow did not move. I crept more carefully than I had ever done before. Inching my way to the entrance, I found myself holding my breath. Only the rain and the distant surf disturbed the silence. No thunder and lightning. The storm might be ending. Naked as I was, I got to the turn that led to the entrance. It felt like an eternity before I moved my eye so I could peer out.