“Go, go, go!” he shouted.
A shadow drew his eyes up and what he saw held his attention. The creature was silhouetted against the bright green canopy. He couldn’t see colors, or details, but its overall shape had been revealed. It had a rounded head, like an oversize, dull arrowhead. He saw four legs sporting clawed feet, splayed wide. The body was just a foot long, but its tail, which wagged frantically back and forth, extended another foot. But none of this held his gaze for long. It was the two translucent wings, for lack of a better word, extending out from the creature’s midsection that had him transfixed—and caused him to run into a fallen tree.
The limb caught him across the waist and flipped him ass over tea kettle like a professional wrestler. The loud “oof!” that escaped his lungs and the thud of his body hitting the jungle floor spun Joliet around.
“Mark!”
He pushed himself up and shouted, “Keep going! Get help!”
As he caught his breath, Hawkins noticed he no longer held his knife. While keeping his eyes up and on the lookout for danger, he searched the area around him with his hands. I’m lucky I didn’t fall on the blade, he thought. What an idiotic way to die that would have been.
A chirp that was one part whistle, one part growl spun him around. The creature stood upon the fallen tree, staring into his eyes. It was three feet long from snout to tail and covered in yellow- and black-striped scales. Its size wouldn’t normally intimidate him, but the hooked inch-long claws it used to cling to the tree looked dangerous. And when it chirped again, he saw two rows of needlelike teeth accompanied by two snakelike fangs. The wings he’d seen were now gone, folded beneath the creature’s pale belly.
Even though the lizard looked imposing, and its ability to fly was certainly surreal, Hawkins felt he could handle the creature, even without his knife.
But the chirps closing in reminded him that this creature was not alone, and nature is full of predators that worked together to take down much larger prey. Including people.
Hawkins’s hand struck something hard. He reached his fingers out and felt the familiar shape of his knife’s hilt. He clutched it tight, waiting for the right moment to strike.
He didn’t have to wait long. The lizard sprang from the tree. Its wings snapped open from beneath its body and it covered the distance between them in a flash. Hawkins fell back and as the creature passed overhead, he slashed out with the knife. The blade slid through the wing’s membrane so easily that Hawkins wasn’t sure he’d struck a blow.
But then the lizard crashed to the jungle floor, shrieking in agony.
The sound seemed to agitate the other lizards. They bounded from tree to tree, flying and clinging, closing the distance. Everywhere he looked, serpentine eyes stared hungrily at him.
A rustling on the jungle floor alerted him to danger. He stood quickly and saw the wounded lizard charging him. Instincts born of a childhood on the soccer field took over. Hawkins kicked the thing and sent it flying, though much less gracefully than it was accustomed to.
“Hawkins, get down!”
He obeyed the voice, ducking quickly. He heard an impact above him. A large stone fell to the ground next to him, accompanied by one of the lizards. It was stunned, but far from dead.
Hawkins turned toward the voice and saw Joliet, armed with another stone. He ran to her. “I told you to leave.”
“And I just saved your life,” she said before turning and making a beeline for the beach.
Hawkins thought Joliet’s claim was a little exaggerated, but kept it to himself. Now was not the time for arguing the details, and he couldn’t deny he owed her a “thank you.” Still, she should have listened. In a different situation, she could have been killed.
Spurred by the knowledge that the jungle’s denizens really did want to maul them, the pair charged toward the beach, blazing a new path through the jungle. The chirping behind them grew louder. Frantic. And then, all at once, it stopped. The jungle fell silent.
The sudden silence was so powerful that Hawkins and Joliet actually stopped. Hawkins spun around, knife at the ready. “What the hell?”
“Where did they go?”
Where he expected to see dozens of flying lizards, or at least several clinging to trees, he saw nothing. Not a living thing. The jungle was just as empty as it had been the first time they’d entered it.
Still, he knew they were there.
He backed away, toward the beach, which was just a few feet behind them now. He could hear the faint lapping of waves, smell the salty air, and feel the hot sun on his back. Did the creatures sense the beach? he wondered. Do they not like the light? Or is there something else about the beach that frightens them?
When Joliet stepped out onto the beach and let out a shout of surprise, he feared his last guess was correct. He charged out after her, ready for action. The first thing he saw was Bray, shirtless, filthy, and covered with sweat. Then he saw what lay at Bray’s feet and for the first time since they left the pillbox, he thought he might prefer the jungle to the beach.
14.
Hawkins remembered what it felt like to look at a corpse. Fresh or long since decomposed, the sight of a human being with the life drained from it left a mark on his soul every time, even more so when the evidence of a violent death was plainly visible. He kept his resolve while on the job, but occasionally found himself washing the images from his mind with alcohol. He’d never abused the substance, but had no trouble using it to forget, at least for a few hours, the poignant reminder of his own frailty.
The scene on the beach reminded him how easily human life could be lost.
Fifteen times over.
Bray stood at the end of the line of uncovered bodies—skeletons, really—out of breath and soaked with sweat. His eyes were swollen and red. Had he been crying? The man had exhumed a mass grave on his own, after all. And from where Hawkins stood, it appeared each and every one of the dead had been murdered in the same fashion as the first they’d stumbled upon.
“Oh my God,” Joliet said. “This is a mass grave?”
“This is just the top layer,” Bray said. “There are more underneath.”
Hawkins saw a body with what looked like a third arm and came to the same conclusion as Bray. Other bodies had been buried below. After quickly scanning the jungle behind him and finding no shifting shadows or striped reptilian skin, he knelt down at the head of the nearest body. The skull had been caved in by something blunt, and powerful. Death would have been quick, at least, he thought, assuming this was the one and only wound these people suffered.
Joliet walked down the line of bodies, stopping to look at each one. “Who are they?”
“Three of them were Americans,” Bray said. “World War Two sailors. I’m not sure about the rest.”
Joliet turned to Bray. “Americans?”
Bray held out his hands and let three sets of dog tags dangle from their chains. He separated one from the others and read the name. “Coffman.” He pointed to the body at his feet. “He’s this one here. Just finished clearing him off.”
Hawkins moved down the line to Coffman’s body, his eyes jumping back to the jungle every few moments, looking for motion.
Bray read the rest of the tag. “Coffman. J. P. 452386 C. That’s his serial number. The ‘C’ means he was Catholic. ‘Type A.’ That’s his blood type. They didn’t do positive or negative back then. Next line is the date of his last tetanus shot. 4/1942, which is how I dated them. ‘USN’ for United States Navy. And I suspect that’s all his interrogators got out of him, too, considering his wounds.”
Hawkins had just noticed the multiple breaks in the man’s ribs. It’s possible he was punched repeatedly or just whacked a few times with whatever crushed his skull in. Straight nicks and scratches covering his arms, legs, and face; the kind caused by blades or, in the wild, claws and teeth. There was no denying the man had been tortured before he died.
“We need to cover them back up,” Bray said.
> “I thought you wanted to remove the body?” Joliet asked.
“When there was just one body,” Bray said. “This isn’t simply a murder anymore. It’s a mass grave. Evidence of war crimes. Some of the guys who did this stuff during the war are still alive. Barely, but that doesn’t mean whoever did this should escape justice in the history books. Someone is going to have to search this whole island for more.”
Bray straightened suddenly as though waking from a dream. “What happened with you two? You didn’t find Kam?” He squinted at them. “And why were you running?”
Hawkins offered Bray a bullet list of everything they’d discovered: the rat, the pillbox that supported evidence of the island being populated during World War Two, the size of the island, and finally their flight from the flying lizards.”
When Hawkins finished, Bray eyed the jungle nervously. “Flying lizards? Geez. Can you describe them?”
“I can draw one for you back at the Magellan,” Hawkins said. While far from an artist, he sketched in his free time and, according to Bray, he was a “regular Picasso.” But Picasso represented the extent of Bray’s knowledge of the arts outside of the multiplex movie theater.
Hawkins stood and took the two-way radio from his pocket. He pushed the Talk button and said, “Captain Drake, this is Hawkins. You read?”
After a moment of static, the captain’s voice came from the speaker. “I read you, Hawkins. Didn’t think I’d hear from you so soon. Did you find Kam already? Over.”
“No, sir. It’s a long story and I’d prefer to give you the details in person. But the short version is that we think Kam either fell overboard … or he was taken. Whoever fled the ship and left those footprints in the sand knows this island well. Over.”
“That doesn’t sound good,” Drake said.
Hawkins looked out at the pale blue hull of the Magellan. If he didn’t look at his feet, or back at the foreboding jungle behind him, the scene appeared picturesque. Real postcard material. But the beauty of this place was cosmetic. Beneath the stunning views lurked a dark and bloody past. “It’s not, sir. How are things on your end? Over.”
“Making some progress actually, hold on.”
The line went silent. During that time, Hawkins’s eyes lowered to Coffman’s body. He looked at the legs and saw that both had been fractured multiple times and allowed to heal incorrectly. He couldn’t imagine the kind of pain this man endured. What could he have known that would make him endure this kind of torture? Unless, Hawkins thought, this wasn’t torture.
Coffman had been tortured. Of that there was no doubt. But were they trying to extract information from him or simply entertaining themselves?
“This is odd,” Joliet said, bending down to the skeleton with the illusion of a third arm.
Hawkins glanced at her, but as he did, he saw something strange, too. He turned back to Coffman’s body. The left arm looked strange. He turned his head to the side, trying to get a good look at both arms at once. He knelt down and placed one hand at Coffman’s shoulder and the other at his wrist—the hand was missing. Without shifting his hands, he picked them up and moved them to the right arm. The hell? While his system of measurement was crude, he felt positive that Coffman’s left arm was at least three inches shorter than the right. The bones in the left arm were also thinner.
Was Coffman deformed? Hawkins wondered, but then discounted it. He doubted a man with a deformed arm would have seen active duty outside of an office setting or hospital. It might not have been much of a handicap, but in a war setting, a weaker arm would definitely be a liability. Then what? Malnutrition? That didn’t make sense, either. It wouldn’t affect a single arm.
Hawkins leaned in close. The left arm almost looked dainty. Feminine. His head snapped to the left, where the woman they’d first discovered lay, three bodies over. The woman’s right arm lay to her side. The left arm was missing.
He faintly heard Bray asking him what he was doing, but ignored the man. He could barely hear him over the rushing of his own blood. He measured out the left arm again. Doing his best to keep his arms in place, he stood and walked to the skeleton missing an arm. He placed his hands over the right arm.
They matched.
He leaned up, eyes wide, but not seeing. “Fuck.”
Hawkins snapped out of his daze. Joliet had muttered the same curse, at the same moment he had.
“What is it with you two?” Bray asked as he stomped toward them. “What are you doing?”
“Coffman’s left arm,” Hawkins said. “It’s not his.” He looked down at the woman missing a limb. He pointed to the empty shoulder joint. “It’s hers.”
Bray stumbled back a few steps. “What?” His eyes darted back and forth between Coffman’s body and the woman’s. “That can’t be right.”
“It’s right,” Joliet said and then pointed to the body she’d been inspecting. “You thought there was another row of bodies beneath these because of the extra limbs.” She looked up at Bray. “There is no second row. The third arm—” Her eyes moved to Hawkins. “It’s been surgically attached.”
Hawkins and Bray both leaned over the woman. Joliet had cleared the sand away from the arm, revealing a shoulder ball joint with a pin in it. The pin ran straight through the bone where it attached to the sixth rib. It wasn’t hard to picture this person in life, in agony, with a limp arm hanging from the ribs.
“These people weren’t tortured,” he said. “They were experimented on.”
A deep roar filled the lagoon valley. All three of them jumped back, spinning around in search of the sound’s source. Hawkins found it in a cloud of gray smoke issuing from the Magellan’s exhaust.
The engines were running.
“How you like that?” Drake said over the radio, sounding pleased. “It’s about as piss-poor a rig as I’ve ever seen. We’ll have to two-way radio every course change to the engine room so they can manually adjust the ship, but we’ll be mobile.”
Hawkins stood and looked down at the three-armed body. “You have no idea how happy I am to hear that, sir.”
He knew they couldn’t leave without discovering Kam’s fate, but it was nice to know they could, if they had to. He didn’t think getting through the sharply bending channel that led into the lagoon would be easy, but if they moved slowly enough, they could do it. They could escape the island graveyard.
“Let’s get back to the Magellan,” Hawkins said. “Figure out what to do next.”
Neither Bray nor Joliet disagreed. They quickly and quietly made for the Zodiac. Hawkins took one last look at the jungle and the bodies and hoped that if Kam were in the hands of the people who had committed these crimes, or their descendants, that he was being treated well, or already dead. The alternative was unthinkable.
15.
The lavish spread on the mess hall’s long dinner table felt inappropriate, given the fact that two men were dead, another missing, and they’d just uncovered the bodies of fifteen mutilated war crime victims, at least three of which were United States Navy. But it seemed surviving the storm and getting the engines back up was cause for celebration. At least it was to the Tweedle brothers.
In attendance were Captain Drake, Blok, Bray, Joliet, and Hawkins. Ray and Jim Clifton remained in the kitchen preparing meals for Jones and Bennett, who’d kept working in engineering, Sanchez, in case he woke up, and DeWinter, who manned the bridge. The crew normally ate in shifts, and the captain almost always ate alone, but this was as much a group debriefing as it was a meal.
The table held an assortment of foods. Grilled steaks sat in front of everyone except for Blok, a vegetarian who got pasta instead. Sides included mashed potatoes, green beans, and salads with dried cranberry, sugar-coated almonds, and avocado, served in frozen bowls. Not exactly high on the fancy scale, but filling, comforting, and served with red wine that helped ease Hawkins’s tension.
He’d eaten quickly, devouring the food while listening to Jones explain how the young Phil Bennett had bee
n the one to figure out the engine problems. He heard the details, but only retained what was important—the engines worked. After Jones finished speaking, conversation faded to little more than “pass the salt.” It seemed that discussing what they’d found on the island, both living and dead, would wait until everyone had finished eating. During the silence, Hawkins sketched the strange lizard he’d seen. He drew a top view, a side view, and a nasty close-up of its strange, fanged teeth.
His mind drifted as he used a paper stump to smudge the dark charcoal he employed to draw the image. The shading brought the lizards face to life, its black and white eye staring at Hawkins as it had in the jungle—with grim intention.
Drake cleared his throat loudly, snapping Hawkins out of his memories. He flinched and dragged a smudge across the creature’s extended wing.
After wiping his bearded face with a cloth napkin, Drake said, “I don’t normally do things this way, but given the gravity of our situation, I want to hear from all of you before I make any decisions.” He tossed the napkin on his cleared plate and continued. “We’ve got two men dead, one that might be in a coma, and another missing. We have the most basic control of the Magellan, but still no communications, no radar, no navigations. If we try to leave we’ll be sailing by the stars with no weather service. We’d be on our own.
“Way I see it,” the captain said, “we have three choices. First, we stay right here, find Kam, and then leave.”
“Uh-uh,” Bray said, nibbling on an almond. “If someone boarded the Magellan and took Kam, I don’t think we should make ourselves a target by staying in the lagoon.”
Joliet wielded her fork like a laser pointer, aiming it at Bray. “You think we should leave Kam behind?”
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