The Island - Part 2 (Fallen Earth)

by Stark, Michael

  Sleep came quickly, so fast I don’t remember my head hitting the rolled-up jacket I used as a pillow. I do remember the dreams. They were full of monsters, wild, menacing things that looked as if they had been spawned in hell and were eager for the taste of flesh. They flew. They crawled. They marched and they swam.

  Cities burned and people died. Great battles raged across a scorched earth filled with the crumbling remains of life as it would never be again. Blood flowed in rivers, deep and red, and still they came, rising up from great, black holes ripped out of the ground. They came by the millions, twisted, ugly beasts that nature had never intended, so many of them that the earth disappeared beneath the surging bodies.

  And they all knew my name.

  “We-lee-um.”

  Chapter IX - The Others

  Morning dawned as bright and sunny as Elsie had predicted. Warmth poured from the golden sun rising over the ocean and burned through chill from the night before. I rose, stiff and cold, feeling as if I’d gone on a wild drinking spree the night before. My back ached from lying on the hard wooden planks all night. My teeth felt as if they’d grown a layer of skin overnight. I ran a parched tongue against them and grimaced at how thick it felt. The taste in my mouth didn’t help either. Imagine sucking on old copper pennies and fermented milk for a couple of hours. That’s close, but still not quite as bad.

  Kelly and Tyler stood watch. Both looked tired and unkempt, as if they’d just rolled out of bed themselves. They sat huddled against the station wall with the rifle propped up against the siding between them. Kelly cradled a steaming cup.

  The thought of coffee sent me struggling upright with the blankets I’d brought from Angel the night before still wrapped around me. The coverings had somehow twisted themselves around my legs and body like long fuzzy tentacles while I slept and threatened to send me sprawling.

  She glanced over and watched me do battle with my bedding. I finally shrugged them off and celebrated my victory with a curse.

  “Damn things.”

  The girl grinned.

  “You look rough.”

  “I feel rough,” I agreed. My voice came out harsh and gravely.

  She waved her cup toward the door.

  “Everyone else is up. Elsie had breakfast and coffee ready half an hour ago. Last time I looked inside she was brewing a pot of tea and digging through one of our coolers looking for ice.”

  A faint smile twisted her lips. “I don’t know how much she found. Most of ours had already melted. She said you would be unbearably grouchy and mean if you didn’t get your coffee and tea this morning.”

  “She’s right,” I grunted, “my body’s weird. I can go without food for days. But take away the liquids and I’m useless.”

  I scratched at my face and squinted against the sun. “What’s for breakfast?”

  She made a face. “Not much. Between Joshua’s people and us, we had lots of oatmeal and Tang. They had the bottom end of a loaf of bread.”

  I winced. “So it’s mush and dry toast?”

  Kelly nodded. “That’s about the gist of it.”

  She lifted the cup.

  “There’s a bright side. At least the coffee is good.”

  That thought alone was enough to send me staggering into the station. She hadn’t exaggerated. The coffee was good. As for the food, it possessed one enduring quality. It knocked the edge off the hunger gnawing at my stomach. Beyond that, boring, bland, and tasteless were the best descriptions I could offer for the lot of it.

  Even so, that modest fare would be gone before long. I had supplied Angel for a month, giving up luxuries for basics, figuring I could supplement my diet with seafood. Those supplies had been loaded with one person in mind, not eleven. At best we might be able to stretch the food for a week with ten days as the absolute limit. The others had supplies as well, but most of those had been depleted before the ban went down.

  I washed up in the bathroom afterward, shivering like I had the night before. Around the point that my privates started trying to crawl back inside my body, I made a mental note to look at the plumbing and water setup. Dousing your body with cold water is rarely a pleasant experience. Doing so when you’re already chilled is flat-out painful. I had no desire to repeat that process every morning, especially since the mornings would grow colder as fall headed toward winter. The only pleasant experience involved with the whole routine turned out to be brushing my teeth.

  Thirty minutes later, the entire station headed down to the boat. Everyone came. Elsie and Daniel rode in the dune buggy with the rifle stuck between them. The rest of us walked. Keith and Devon bore off halfway down to look for tools and to dig the grave. I almost stopped them, but the events of the night before seemed distant and removed from the bright light of day.

  The storm had strewn tree limbs and debris across the open field where most of the houses sat. Just up from the shoreline, a tall live oak had been split wide open by lightning. Half of it still stood reaching toward the heavens. The other half lay broken on the ground, still smelling of ozone. None of that could wash away the sparkling clean feel of the air and sun. The town might need a bit of cleanup, but the morning had turned out absolutely glorious.

  Angel sat grounded high on the edge of the island with no water within ten feet of her. The little channel that led up to the beach had dried up completely, exposing a wide swath of thick, black mud. The only sand in sight clung to the edge of the shoreline in a thin strip. Everything beyond looked like goo poured from a witch’s cauldron and smelled about as bad.

  I climbed aboard first and wrestled the body into the cockpit floor with the tarp underneath. Moving Zachary proved difficult. It felt like trying to pushing two different sacks of flour with a rope tied between them, while slipping and sliding in ankle-deep vomit. He retained weight at the extremities, but had nothing in the middle but loose skin to hold the upper half and lower half together. When I finally had him in the cockpit floor, I pulled up the ends of the tarp like a sling.

  Tyler helped me lift him out, holding his end at arms length in an attempt to avoid the grisly bits of flesh and drool dripping from the bottom. Once we had the body up in the grass, I took Daniel for a walk while the rest looked at what lay inside the tarp. We returned to white faces, some of which also looked nauseated.

  Elsie took Daniel and rode up toward the little cemetery on the opposite end of town to check on the gravesite. Nearly forty-five minutes passed before she returned.

  “They were still wandering around looking for a shovel. Then I remembered one of my customers talking about doing cleanup out here and saying they’d stored tools in the old general store,” she said as she pulled a stray bit of hair out of her eyes. “I took them down to it. We found shovels, axes, a pick axe, and hammers, quite a bit of stuff. We’ll have more hand tools than we’ll need.”

  “Well, at least we’ll have an abundance of something,” I said drily and motioned for Tyler to grab the other end of the tarp. Joshua and Kelly stepped in as well. Between the four of us, we carried the body across the field and up into the little nook where gravestones a century old waited beside the new hole Devon and Keith had dug in the sandy soil. We laid him to rest in the shade of a tall white pine, amid a carpet of soft, brown needles that had dropped from the tree. Devon and Keith, though red-faced and sweating, went right back to work filling in the hole they’d just dug.

  I watched them for a moment, then stepped back, trying to approximate my position from the night before. They’d dug the grave in the expanse of open ground that Daniel had highlighted.

  “Someone should have said something,” Elsie remarked as they tamped the last bit of dirt atop the new mound.

  I glanced at Tyler. Kelly caught the look and shook her head.

  “Maybe later,” I told Elsie.

  She frowned as if she wanted to argue, but said nothing.

  I turned back to the group behind me. They were a young, but ragtag lot. All of them looked like a warm bath
and some decent rest would serve them better than anything. Unfortunately, a warm bath might be a long time coming, and rest certainly would.

  “Keith, Devon, take stock of the tools at the General Store. Make a list of everything you can find. When you’re done there, check out the rest of the houses. We need everything you can find. While you’re at it, check out the other cisterns. As of right now, clean water is sitting at the top of the priority list. “

  I pointed at Kelly.

  “You and Tyler go back to my boat and start unloading it, food, clothes all of it. Joshua and Denise can help transfer it. I want everything that isn’t nailed down up to the station as soon as possible. Elsie, you take Daniel and the other two girls back to the station. Tally up everything that comes in.”

  “We have more stuff in our camp too,” Joshua offered.

  I nodded. “Once you have the boat unloaded, move everything to the station. Keep the rifle with you. You see anything weird or run into any type of trouble, fire a shot. That will be our alarm bell.”

  He shot a glance toward the dune buggy. The Marlin leaned against the passenger’s side. “I can do that.”

  I started to turn when another thought clicked. “Oh, and don’t forget the bleach. It’s under the sink. We’ll need it to disinfect the water.”

  Elsie brushed her gray hair back.

  “Where are you going, Hill William?”

  “Down the beach,” I told her. “We passed three camps on the way up. The closest is only a couple of miles down. Those folks are going to need shelter too.”

  “You’re going to be alone. Why don’t you take the rifle with you?” Joshua asked.

  I shook my head. “No, it needs to stay here. We need some way of alerting everyone, and if need be, protecting everyone. I took a couple of knives off Angel last night. One of them is a diving knife.”

  He looked confused.

  “Think big--like miniature sword,” I said.

  Elsie looked doubtful, but I kept going.

  “While you all are getting set up, I’m going back to the boat. There’s a few things I’ll set out for you that you’d probably not take on your own, but we’re going to need them. The same goes for stuff you find in the village. Bring it all back.”

  I studied their faces. “We’re on our own now. We can’t leave. We can’t even try without running the risk of getting arrested or worse. So be thorough. The longer we have to stay here, the more we’re going to need.”

  I left them with that thought and headed back to the boat. I took Keith’s shovel with me and used it to clean the mess out of the cockpit floor, tossing the slimy bits of flesh over the side. When the tide came back in, most of it would disappear, some eaten by fish and crabs, some simply washed away by the current. Angel needed a good scrubbing, or at least a good dousing. I didn’t have the time, though, and had no desire to slog through stinking black mud to fetch water.

  With that done, I set about gathering items I wanted back at the station. I pulled one of the batteries from under the forward bunk and set it on the cockpit seat next to the bank. Going back forward, I took a screwdriver from the sink drawer and unscrewed the overhead light in the forward part of the cabin. Digging through the lockers, I hunted out the little windmill Dad had made to recharge the buggy. Next to it, I placed a repair kit he kept for doing electrical work.

  The station needed light. Joshua’s lanterns wouldn’t last forever. While the cabin light wouldn’t be as bright as the lanterns, I could recharge the battery. I couldn’t refill the propane tanks.

  Back inside, I looked around, wondering what I was missing. The truth was, I could have stripped her down to nothing and still needed a thousand different things. From one of the rear hatches, I extracted another of Dad’s inventions, this one little more than a box built to hold a spare battery. Twelve volt plugs mounted on the outside offered power stations like those inside a car. A pair of cables inside hooked to the battery posts, and powered the plugs. He called it his Camper’s box, and used it for everything from recharging small electronics to running a DC television he’d had when I was a kid.

  Next to it, lying tucked up in the corner, I found a small first aid kit. That sent me flying back into the cabin where I dug out the bigger kit from a locker underneath the port side bunk. Although I had stocked it well, the two of them combined still made for a pitiful collection of medical supplies. Eleven people depended on what lay inside those two plastic boxes. The thought made me sigh.

  Both cases contained only over-the-counter supplies and medicines. Still, we could treat fevers, general aches and pains, sterilize and bandage wounds, plus handle a host of minor medical conditions. I laid them out alongside the other items figuring that anything would be better than nothing.

  I also hunted down the rest of the ammunition for the rifle. I’d felt overpowered when I’d bought the extra box of shells. The feeling went the opposite way when I pulled out the unopened box. I wanted a dozen more, not just one.

  The last few items I pulled from the boat, I wanted for the hike down the beach. I grabbed a day pack, and stuffed it with a water bottle I topped off from the boat’s supply, another bottle full of cold tea, some ham, cheese and bread from the cooler, and after a moment’s consideration, the last flashlight aboard. The thought of needing the light prompted the addition of a cigarette lighter from the sink drawer, and about fifty feet of 3/8-inch line I’d seen when hunting for the first aid kit. I had no desire to spend the night on the beach. At the same time, if I ended up there, I wanted a way to build a fire and construct some type of shelter. I had the tent, but had no desire to sleep inside those flimsy walls again. After seeing the claws on the little devil, I would rather scrape a hole out in the sand and tie thick branches together as a cover than be trapped inside a tent.

  That thought led to another round of even more feverish digging through lockers and bags until I found the cans of mosquito repellant. I had no idea what else might slither or crawl through the night, but Portsmouth had garnered fame among its visitors for the healthy mosquito population it fostered. Twisted little demons from hell might want my blood. The mosquitoes would damned well have it if I ended up sleeping on the beach.

  Tyler, Kelly, and Denise had arrived by the time I’d finished. I pointed out the things I wanted them to transfer in addition to the food and clothing.

  “Take anything loose that you think might be helpful,” I told them. “Don’t cannibalize her or anything. Sooner or later, we’ll leave this island, and may need a working boat to make the crossing, but feel free to raid the lockers.”

  I motioned back toward the inlet. “I left some containers on the dock yesterday evening. The big blue jugs have water in them, fourteen gallons of it. The small blue jug is kerosene. I used it for cooking and for a small kerosene lantern. I’ll set out the lantern. It doesn’t give off a lot of light, but it’s better than nothing.”

  Kelly waved her hand. “Don’t worry about us. We’ll get everything off, but we won’t strip it down.”

  I grinned. “Thanks. I had images in my mind of coming back to an empty hull. Oh, before I forget, there are two coolers inside. The one near the hatch will make breakfast better the next few days. The other one is under the starboard bunk. It’s full of meat. Set them both inside and out of the sun when you get to the station.”

  “We’ll be okay, “she insisted. “You’d better get going. It’s noon already.”

  She was right. I had a four to six-mile hike in front of me. October nights came early on the island. The prospect of traveling after sundown held neither interest nor appeal.

  I grabbed up the day pack and slung it over my shoulder. After a last round of goodbyes, I headed up the hill toward the station. I still needed the diving knife and wanted to talk to Elsie before I left.

  Just past the tree that had been split by lightning, I passed Joshua heading the other way and grinned at the sight of his lanky frame stuffed inside the little vehicle. He rolled the buggy to
a stop about twenty feet away, but I waved him on. The day was slipping away. He and I could chit-chat later.

  When I walked into the station a few minutes later, Elsie had the girls cleaning cabinets while she worked over several sheets of paper laid out on the table in the big room.

  “I’m separating supplies,” she said when I walked through the door. “Food stocks go on one, tools on another. I’m putting clothing, blankets, sleeping bags, and camping equipment on yet another.”

  She held up a final sheet. “This one will be all the miscellaneous stuff. If I need to break it down further, I will, but by the time you get back, I’ll have a good idea of what we have, and what we’re going to need.”

  I looked around. “Where’s Daniel?”

  She motioned toward the ceiling with her pen. “He’s upstairs rummaging around. We can’t just sprawl out in here every night. This place, as big as it is, will get cramped soon. Once we get everything here and stored, I’m going to put these kids to cleaning out the rooms on the second level.”

  Elsie peered at me over her glasses. “There are a couple of big rooms up there off from the dormitory that will make fine bedrooms. You boys can have the dorm room.”

  She paused and waited. I wasn’t sure why unless she expected me to argue over the sleeping space.

  “Girls need privacy, you know,” she said finally, “but I don’t know how we’re going to get by with one bathroom for all these people.”

  I frowned at her. “There’s not another upstairs?”

  She sighed. “Hill William, this place was built over a hundred years ago. It ain’t like houses built these days where everyone has their own bathroom. Besides, water don’t run uphill. It only works down here because its gravity-fed from the cistern.”