The Island - Part 2 (Fallen Earth)

by Stark, Michael

  I’d intended to use the flashlight like a headlight for the buggy, but left it switched off. The little vehicle’s electric engine made virtually no noise. The path was as dark going back as it had been coming, but I had no intention of advertising my position by burning a bright hole through the darkness. I let the buggy ghost along, silently, with the only sound coming from the faint whir of the motor and sand hissing under the tires.

  Admitting you’re scared is hard for anyone who has left childhood behind. It’s okay when you’re young. You’ve not yet reached the age when science has explained that night holds no monsters, and the terrors that stride across our imaginations are nothing but fairy tales. I was scared--not of the night, not of my imagination, nor of fairy tales, but of a waist-high demon imp who had a taste for body parts. I had no idea where it went, if it had kept flying or had circled back around hoping to ambush me at an opportune moment. I drove with one hand and clutched the gun with the other. If the thing swooped down on me from behind or at some odd angle, I couldn’t be sure the barrel would be pointed in the right direction. But, I could sure as hell make certain it wasn’t out of reach.

  Twenty minutes later, the station swam into sight as I cleared a stand of trees. Lights blazed from the windows. On the porch I could see figures moving. Only then did I feel comfortable enough to set the rifle down in the seat beside me. My hand struck something rectangular and hard in my jacket pocket when I did. I reached inside and pulled out the pack of cigarettes I’d picked up in the cabin. I let go of the wheel and lit one while letting the buggy coast along by itself. I needed the harsh rasp of smoke and the calming effect of the nicotine more than I needed to drive.

  The buggy rolled up in front of the station with me reeling from the tobacco-induced high. I waited for it to pass before I climbed out. Elsie, Joshua, Tyler and Kelly stood on the porch.

  “Where have you been, Hill William?” Elsie demanded, clutching her jacket close about her body.

  Joshua glanced at her, and looked back at me.

  “We heard shots, three or four of them.”

  I grabbed the rifle and climbed out of the buggy. All four of them froze.

  “From me,” I said, even though the announcement wasn’t needed.

  I walked up into the light.

  Tyler frowned. Kelly looked scared.

  Elsie reached out and took my arm.

  “What happened to you?”

  I looked at her.

  “Where’s Daniel?”

  She drew her hand back hastily and stiffened.

  “Why? What do you want him for?”

  “Get him,” I told her. “He and I have a talk coming, and right now is as good a time as any.”

  Elsie glared at me and drew herself up straight.

  “Now you listen here, Hill William.”

  “No,” I interrupted, “you listen. Either you’re going to get him, or I am. He and I are going to talk whether you like it or not. You can sit in if you don’t interfere, but that conversation is going to happen.”

  Joshua stepped to her defense, moving between the two of us.

  “Hang on now, William. She’s his guardian. She has the right to say whether or not you can question him, which is exactly what it sounds like you have in mind.”

  I sighed. I had no anger in me. What lurked inside was cold and determined.

  “Joshua, move aside. If you don’t, I’ll do the moving for you.”

  “There’s no call for that kind of talk,” he protested.

  I felt sorry for him in a way. People like Joshua had spent their lives talking themselves from one point to another, through one problem after another. Most of them carry a sense of disdain for violent action. I didn’t care much for violence myself. Here and there though, Virgil and a couple of unwanted altercations had demonstrated that nothing drove a point home quite so clearly.

  I reached out and took him by the front of his shirt. He made to draw back and pull away. I should have told him what working with wood and lumber does to a person. You don’t grow bulging muscles like the body builders. You grow the kind that makes things move when you take hold of them. Joshua did, move that is, all the way out into the yard where he landed in a wild sprawl of tangled limbs.

  For the first time since I’d met her, Elsie’s eyes showed fear. The determination inside turned to embarrassment. I started to tell her I had no intention of hurting her. Then I realized she wasn’t afraid of me. The fear in her face came from the boy inside--maybe not him, but what I would discover.

  “Go get him, Elsie,“ I said as gently as I could. “The choices are gone. I’m going to talk to him. I’d like you to be there, but push comes to shove, I’ll talk to him myself. He knows things.”

  Tears formed in her eyes.

  “He’s so young, Hill William.”

  I nodded.

  “I know. But, I need answers.”

  Tyler spoke up behind me.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Hill? What were you shooting at?”

  I looked at him.

  “I think I know who, or what, is eating the people.”

  Kelly frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  I waved toward the station.

  “On the radio today, remember? When they were talking about finding torn-up bodies? I think I know what’s doing it. In fact, I think I just shot one of them.”

  The woman drew back, an incredulous look on her face.

  “What?” Tyler exclaimed. “Dude, you’re not serious. Where?”

  I hesitated, but had gone too far now to backpedal.

  “I found it in the back of my boat, eating your friend,” I said wearily. Ignoring the stunned looks of disbelief on their faces, I laid the story out piece by piece. By the time I was done, Elsie’s gray eyes were wider than I believed they could ever stretch. Kelly had her hand to her mouth, her own eyes wide. Tyler looked sick.

  Joshua had pulled himself up with a groan, but even he stood motionless.

  “Why do you want Daniel?” Elsie finally asked in a small voice.

  “Because,” I said, “ten minutes before I left, he came out on the porch and told me not to go. He said, I’d have to kill him again if I did.”

  I saw the confusion on their faces.

  “Yeah, I didn’t understand it either until the thing was gone. One of the shots hit Zachary’s body.”

  I looked at Elsie. “That boy knows things he shouldn’t. I don’t understand how. I really don’t care how. What I do care about is what else he knows. That’s what I’m going to find out tonight.”

  I stared down at her.

  “Now are you going to get him or am I?”

  She stepped back. “I will. Give me a minute with him, okay?”

  I nodded and waited until the door swung shut behind her before turning to Joshua.

  “You know how to use this thing?” I asked, holding the rifle up. He looked uncertain.

  “It’s loaded,” I told him. “Just work the lever, point it at whatever you want to kill, and pull the trigger.”

  I paused and gave him a strained smile. “As long as that isn’t me.”

  “This is unreal,” Kelly said as I handed him the gun.

  “No, it’s quite real. I’ll take you down tomorrow morning. You can have all the reality you want.”

  I let my gaze wander from face to face. “Until then, we are on an all-night watch. I want two people at a time out here on the porch. Neither is to leave the other’s sight for any reason. Tyler, you go back inside and figure out the rotation. Get someone out here with Joshua. Two hours, two people, got it?”

  He gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Got it.”

  The door to the station swung open. Light spilled into the yard. Daniel stood framed in another golden halo, this one compliments of Coleman for sure.

  “Hello, Daniel,” I said.

  “Hello, Mr. William,” he answered, his voice as solemn and somber as a graveyard.

  The rest exchanged quick looks.
Tyler motioned for Kelly to follow him and both disappeared inside.

  Joshua took up a station at the other end of the porch. I found a seat on the steps where I could see him. Daniel walked over, his feet bare and silent on the wooden planks.

  He sat down next to me and stared off into the night.

  “Grandma says you want to know what I know,” he said softly, and then turned toward me.

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  In my simple way of processing events, questions are like on-off switches. When they’re in the off position, you wander around in the dark. Flip them over, and like the coyote in the Looney Tunes cartoons, a bulb clicks on and sheds light on the answer.

  When Daniel asked me where I wanted him to start, the light that clicked on didn’t illuminate the issues. It just opened the door to another room filled with more switches and presented an equally thorny problem. Just how does one go about telling a six-year-old what the word prescient means much less that the whole concept is absolutely weird?

  The door opened and Elsie stepped out. Daniel looked as if he wanted to go to her. For that matter, the old woman appeared just as ready to whack me across the head and let him. She kept her distance though. The smell of Johnny Walker swirled in her wake. I shot a curious glance at her and saw a mug in her hand.

  She wrinkled her nose at me and sat back in one of the rocking chairs.

  I turned back to the boy, feeling her gray eyes on my back.

  “What I want to know is this. This morning, you said Zachary reminded you of bats. When I was upstairs, you dropped in to tell me the bad things were getting ready to start. Tonight, you tell me if I go back to the boat, I’ll have to kill him again. Where is that coming from Daniel?“

  A furrow ran across his forehead as he frowned.

  “I don’t know. I just see things.”

  “Like what?” I asked, and then decided that specifics might be better than a broad brush. “Like this morning, why did Zachary remind you of bats?”

  He looked scared. He sat with his hands in his lap, nervously picking at his clothes. When he spoke he wouldn’t look at me directly, but spoke off to the side as if he was afraid of what he would see in my face.

  “I saw a show on TV. It showed pictures of bats hanging in caves and said they sleep upside-down. I thought about that man when you were trying to find him. It seemed like he was sleeping that way too.”

  I licked my lips.

  “He was, sort of. He was hanging upside-down, but he wasn’t sleeping.” Even as I said the words, the thought struck me that Daniel had interpreted the image the best way he could.

  “What about tonight when you said I’d have to kill him again?”

  He crossed his arms tight across his chest and started rocking back and forth.

  “That one was bad. I didn’t like seeing it.”

  “Seeing what?” I prompted him.

  “That man looked scary. His mouth was big and open. It had ears in it and you were afraid. Then you killed him and he was dead again.”

  Chills ran up my arms. I licked my lips again. My mouth seemed as dry as a desert.

  “How did I kill him?”

  He pointed toward Joshua at the end of the steps.

  “With that gun.”

  I looked back at Elsie. She sipped from the cup. Her face bore no expression, but her eyes shone with disapproval.

  “This evening, when you mentioned the bad things, did they have big ears too?”

  He nodded. “Some of them.”

  “Some? What about the rest?”

  Elsie spoke up behind me. “Hill William, don’t you think that’s enough for the night?”

  I held up a hand to silence her.

  “What about the rest, Daniel?”

  He ducked his head and pulled his arms tight across his midsection again. He looked so tiny in the dim light. Even through his jacket I could see the bony outline of his shoulder blades.

  He moaned.

  “Hill William!” Elsie cried. “He’s six years old for God’s sake.”

  I spun around to face her.

  “Yes, he is, and he’s keeping it all bottled up inside him. Do you think its better that he doesn’t talk about it?”

  “He does talk about it,” she shot back.

  “When?” I demanded.

  She hesitated.

  I looked back at Daniel.

  “Do you talk about the things you see?”

  He nodded.

  “When?”

  The boy glanced back at Elsie. Fear stood out plain and strong on his face.

  “He tells me,” Elsie said softly, “when no one else is around.”

  I stared at her dumbfounded.

  “Then you tell me. What else is out there? What has he seen?”

  She gripped the cup hard. Even in the dark, I could see her fingers turn white. She took a deep breath.

  “He says there are all kinds of things. He doesn’t know what they are. Some are big. Their bodies are green. They don’t wear shoes or many clothes at all for that matter. They carry very big knives. There are ugly things that slip through the woods at night. They’re hungry and when they look at people, their mouths water and their eyes glow red. “

  She waved a hand at the sky. “Some fly, some like swamps, some are little. He says there are so many that they look like the ocean with waves on it.”

  Elsie paused. “Can you and I finish this conversation? Daniel’s tired. He was almost asleep when you demanded that I drag him out here. I can tell you what he’s told me.”

  I leaned over and ran a hand through my hair. The day before, I’d have walked away from them both, making faces and humming the theme to The Twilight Zone under my breath. I’d come to Portsmouth to find peace, not the kind where world leaders get together, shake hands, and walk away promising not to kill each other anymore, but the inner kind. Most of my life I had wandered with no real bearings, responding to the pressure of the moment rather than carving out my own road. It had taken the death of my father and a broken marriage before I’d been able to look back and see the wasteland of shattered promises, unrealized dreams, and wounded relationships scattered out behind me. Of all the tattered heaps lying along the path that had led me here, the one I regretted most was the last two years of my father’s life.

  It wasn’t that I missed him, even though I did. It wasn’t that he had always been right, because he was just as wrong at times as anyone else. I came here for peace, because he would have, because these last days on the island were as close as I could ever come to being near him again, and the best way I could say, I’m sorry.

  Instead, I had landed neck-deep in more responsibility than I’d had before I left, with an eighty-two-year-old woman and a six-year-old-boy depending on me. The rest of them would get by. I had no doubt that Elsie would too if the disease spared her. The woman was as tough as leather and sharp. Not only that, she had grown up here. She knew the island better than I did, better than anyone else on it. She knew how to get food, how to make water, what to eat and what to avoid. She knew when the fish would run, what types, and how to catch them. We had a walking encyclopedia of everything Portsmouth with us. She would survive even if no one else did.

  From what I’d gleaned off the radio and news reports, no one had a built-in immunity for the disease. The malevolent little virus struck every segment, every age group, every racial composition with just as much fervor and deadly efficiency as the next. If Elsie went down and Daniel survived, he would be my responsibility, at least until the crisis had passed. Even though being near him gave me the willies, I couldn’t just walk away no matter how much I might want to.

  The boy sat rocking, eyes fixed ahead and staring. I didn’t know if that was his way of dealing with the stress, or if he was off in some other galaxy peering into the future. A sudden and great weariness swept over me.

  I looked up at Elsie and nodded. “Tomorrow, after we bury Zachary, after you call the Judge, we’l
l talk. Go ahead, get him in the bed. I’ll stay out with Joshua until his watch is up.”

  I ran a hand across my face, scrubbing at the stubble forming on my cheeks. “Then I’m going to crash and burn. I can feel it coming.”

  She rose, pulled the boy to his feet, and gathered him up against her. “I think you’ve done enough for tonight. I’ll get one of the others to come out and stand watch.”

  She started for the door with Daniel in tow. Just as she was about to step inside, she looked back. “There’s a bathroom to the left when you come in. It ain’t much, but it’s got running water that’s gravity-fed from the cistern. You need to wash up.”

  The old woman looked apologetic.

  “Sorry, Hill William, but you’re a bit ripe.”

  The thought of being clean came across as heavenly an idea as angels suddenly appearing overhead.

  A couple of minutes later, Denise walked out carrying a jacket. She had let her hair down finally. It hung dark and straight, and reached halfway down her shoulders.

  She waved and looked around.

  I pointed toward Joshua at the end of the porch.

  “He’s down there.”

  She turned and started for him.

  “You two come up closer to the door. I’ll be sleeping out here on the deck,” I called after her. “Don’t worry about me though. I’ll be out in two minutes once I lay down. I just don’t want you and him way down there away from everyone else. I want everyone close tonight.”

  I went inside then and found the bathroom. A cast-iron bathtub that looked old enough to have been carried across on the Mayflower sat on one side. A sink with a washbasin occupied the other side of the room. Right next to it was an honest-to-God toilet. The toilet and the bowl in the sink made sense. The bathtub didn’t, at least not on a frequent basis. The cistern out back looked to be 300 gallons at the most. I couldn’t imagine the luxury of using a tenth of the water supply on a bath.

  I learned quickly that a bath in the station had no luxurious moments. The tub had one faucet, and one knob. I stripped down, climbed in, turned it on and nearly jumped out of my skin. Water came pouring out alright. Elsie had forgotten to mention how cold it was. By the time I was done, no more than a couple of gallons lay pooled in the tub and real shivers were coursing down my back.