Blood and Bone: A Smattering of Unease (2 page)

She lit her torch, then reached into her basket. She pulled out her extra cloak and removed the false bottom from the basket. She buried the now-stilled heart in the pile of melting slivered ice, then replaced the false bottom.

Her hands, her cloak, and no doubt her face, were covered in gore. She peeled off her cloak and dumped water from the skin attached to her belt onto a clean corner of the fabric. She scrubbed at her face, hands, and leather armor as best she could by the waning light of her torch. She balled up the dirty cloak and put it in the basket. She would burn it later.

She gathered up what she could of the chain, collar, and muzzle, dropping the pieces into the basket. She covered herself with her spare cloak, pulled the red hood up over her blonde curls, where it fell forward and obscured her face.

She picked up the basket and moved quickly down the South Path of the Cross. The whole incident had taken less than ten minutes. It wasn’t yet midnight.

Wouldn’t Grandmother Louisa be pleased! And Suluya . . . and Loriana. Tomorrow evening they would dine on the heart of a lycanthrope. Grandmother Louisa’s health would be restored, and she and her old crone friends would gain back their youth.

And Glory would retain her youth forever.

Troy cut the motor and steered
Harmony
carefully into the boathouse. Thanks to a good morning’s catch, he would be dining on fresh swordfish and prawns this evening. Independent island living had made him a skilled fisherman.

He hefted the ice-filled chests, one at a time, onto the boards. He lowered his “walk” from the boat to the boards and guided his chair across. He secured the boat, but not too tightly, and pulled the cover over her; then he pulled the ocean facing doors closed and dropped the latch. He gave both of his boats a once-over, making sure he had done all he could to prevent damage from the storm that the weather reports promised was blowing toward the island.

He loaded the chests into the back compartment of his buggy and left the chair open inside the secured boathouse. He powered the buggy up the boardwalk across the beach to his house. Once inside, he refrigerated his catch. He had already cleaned and cut steaks from the swordfish on the boat, dumping the remnants back into the ocean.

The morning’s activity had whetted Troy’s appetite. He prepared his breakfast and took it out to the deck.

He scanned the horizon with his binoculars. All was clear as far as he could see. There was just a hint of haze where the blue sky met the deeper blue of the ocean, many miles off in the distance. No sign, yet, of the approaching tropical storm. The morning sun hung suspended above the placid South Pacific waters, a bright yellow ball still low enough to spread dawn’s hues of orange and pink throughout the vast oceanic sky.

As he lowered the binoculars, he caught a brief glimpse of something on the sand, something he had missed in his early morning travels on the beach.

He picked up a chunk of mango from his breakfast plate and popped it into his mouth, savoring the sweet, cold fruit while he pondered this new thing that had come to rest on his beach. Arms, legs, a head . . . it was human. A rather limp one.

He set the binocs down on his tray and sipped his coffee.

He supposed he would have to investigate further. There was no one else to whom he could delegate that task. The lack of “helper humans” on his island demonstrated that people weren’t on his favorite species list. His island was fully automated, and his bots performed their tasks well.

Troy reluctantly left his deck to get his tablet and drone. He sent the drone down to the beach, where it took video and basic vitals.

The human flotsam proved to be a young man, about 30 years of age, long-limbed, tan, shaggy sun-bleached hair. The drone registered his heartbeat as well as his breathing.

Damn! The fact that the castaway was still alive meant that Troy would now have to deal with him. He briefly thought about leaving him on the beach until he got up and found the house on his own, or until tropical storm Rae had her way with him. He pushed the thought away. Karma was a coldhearted bitch, as he well knew; it wouldn’t do to rack up bad karma. It shouldn’t matter to him now, as old as he was, but for some reason, it did.

He took the elevator down and drove the buggy out to the boardwalk. He didn’t own a bot capable of retrieving a human from the beach. He knew that if the flotsam had any serious injuries, he would be screwed, because all Troy could do was bend at the waist and haul the body into the buggy by his arms and the back of his shirt.

It took about ten minutes to get the lanky body haphazardly into the buggy so that it wouldn’t slide out again on the fifty-yard drive back to the house. Troy had plenty of upper body strength to go around, and handling the castaway’s body was like handling that of a really big fish – except that he had never handled a 6-foot, 190-lb fish before, and he’d always had a line to reel in.

He sat for a few moments after dragging the body into the buggy, panting and sweating, letting his heart rate calm. He tried to reach and rub the sharp new knot in the middle of his back. As he did, he looked over and studied the intruder’s face. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the younger man during his earlier exertions. Now, Troy felt a sense of déjà vu at the sight of the broad, tanned face and snub nose.

He shook the feeling off. The stranger was too young for him to know or to have known during his previous life in the States.

At the top of the elevator, he maneuvered the dead weight into one of his extra chairs and used his remote to guide it into his “guest” room, where, once again, Troy was faced with heavy lifting. Cursing and muttering under his breath, he managed to get the torso, then legs, entirely onto the guest bed.

The space between Troy’s shoulder blades complained sharply, and he knew his lower back would have its revenge on him by morning. He’d be lucky if he didn’t end up lying flat in his bed for a week from the abuse he was heaping on his body . . . or at least, what was left of it.

He clumsily stripped off the stranger’s sodden clothing, which were worn threadbare and bleached nearly transparent from days spent in salt water and exposure to the relentless Pacific sun.

He didn’t bother trying to dress him; he just left some of his largest, oldest shorts and a t-shirt at the foot of the bed.

He checked vitals again using the MedScan, which provided a clearer analysis of his conditions than the drone had. Vitals were steady. No broken bones, but some deep contusions and a goose egg on the noggin. The worse diagnoses were exposure and dehydration.

Troy could handle cuts, bruises, and the sunburn, but sent for the MedBot to administer the IV. Despite being a hunk of metal and wires, the MedBot was surprisingly competent and gentle.

The reluctant host left the curtains closed and exited the dark room. It could be hours or even days before the intruder regained consciousness.

He wasn’t about to take either of his boats out or send for medical help from the mainland, which was at least a couple of days away. According to the weather reports, the storm would hit within twenty-four hours, and he was fully equipped to take care of his uninvited guest for a week, if need be.

On his way to throw the tattered shorts and shirt into the trash bin, he noticed the wallet in the shorts pocket. Surprised, he said. “How the hell did he not lose
this
?”

He attempted to pull some identification out of the wallet, but everything was wet and stuck together. One of the limp cards tore a little when he tried to peel them apart.

“Nope.”

He tossed the wallet, contents and all, into the dryer.

He glanced at the clock in the living room as he rolled through. “Damn!” he uttered.

The morning was nearly gone, and he was starving. All of the exertion of the last couple of hours had burned up what little fuel he had gained from his half-eaten breakfast.

One of the pastimes that he truly enjoyed and didn’t use bots for was preparing food. He was too hungry to do a from-scratch lunch today, so he just heated his leftovers from the evening before and grabbed himself an imported brew. Smiling to himself beneath his overgrown, unruly moustache and beard, he said with a chuckle, “
Everything
here is imported. I’m in the middle of nowhere!”

He snapped his tray to his chair and returned to his favorite spot on the deck.

He popped the top on his beer bottle. He held it up so that the early afternoon sunlight shone through the amber liquid.

“To you,” he said, toasting the horizon.

In the seventeen years he’d lived on the island, he’d experienced the wrath of five tropical storms: one in 2039, two in 2041, one in 2044, and one in 2046. He supposed he’d been lucky to not to have been hit more often. But then, maybe his island was easy to miss, just the size of a pinpoint in the vastness of the Pacific, and not even large enough to register on a map.

He finished his lunch and rolled into the kitchen to clean up his dishes. He looked in on his uninvited guest, even though there was no need. If anything changed, his cell phone would beep. But he had to satisfy his curiosity.

The human flotsam slept soundly, breathing easily. He hadn’t changed position. Troy was almost disappointed. Though people weren’t his strong suit, it had been months since he’d last had company.

He snapped his fingers, suddenly remembering. “Wallet!”

He pulled it out of the dryer and took it to the living room. He clicked on the satellite television, tuned it to the Weather Channel, and set himself to examining the contents of his guest’s wallet.

“Hmm . . . coupla shopping discount cards . . . sixty-seven dollars . . . library card . . . destroyed photograph . . . aha! Driver’s license!” He held the item up in front of him as though he had won a prize.

“Thomas Quinn. Age 33. Six-foot-one. Blue eyes. Blonde hair. Atlanta, Georgia.”

Troy’s forehead wrinkled as he concentrated, waving the driver’s license to and fro as though fanning himself. “Thomas Quinn. Thomas Quinn . . . Tom Quinn . . . Tommy Quinn . . .
Tommy Quinn
.”

His eyes widened and he felt the blood drain from his face as realization struck him. “No. It can’t be!” He picked up his glasses from their place on his tray and examined the photo, which had been protected from the salt water by its lamination. “Oh, shit.”

Because it
was
. “How the hell . . .”

He wasted no time. He rolled to the panic room behind the kitchen. He keyed the combination into the number pad beside the door, which clicked open to allow him admittance. He rolled inside, grabbed a cardboard box and set it on his tray. Rolling around the house, he removed various scattered paintings and framed photographs from his walls, and a collection of books from his shelf. He had hung the paintings himself, so they were within easy reach. Not everything fit in the box, so he stacked some of the paintings on top of its contents. Back in the panic room, he leaned the excess paintings and photographs facing the wall. He set the box heavily on the floor. As he reversed from the room, he locked and closed the door firmly behind him.

“That should do it,” he said.

His phone alarm beeped.

* * *

Tommy blinked blearily, trying to focus on anything within his dim surroundings. A sharp, pulsing pain threatened to explode out of his forehead. His mouth tasted like dust, and his lips were excruciatingly chapped. He was conscious of his battered body: he felt like one big, aching bruise.

He found that he could move his arms and legs with a little effort, but sharp pains and stiffness convinced him to wait a while before trying to move a second time. He discovered that his left arm was attached to an IV drip whose bag hung, suspended, from a portable metal pole. But he could tell, even in the darkness, that he was not in a hospital room.

It didn’t matter. He was in a comfortable bed, with a roof over his head. And most importantly – he was dry, the bed was fixed in one spot, and it didn’t heave and sway relentlessly.

There was a whirring sound like a small toy car that had been wound up and let go. A robot-like machine rolled up to the bedside, red lights blinking from what Tommy took to be its “face”. A female computerized voice emanated from speaker holes located on its “chin”.

“Please relax, lay back, and rest. You are being treated for dehydration and exposure. Intervenes fluids are being administered. Please do not move unnecessarily or remove the needle from your arm.”

Feeling slightly weirded out but comforted, all the same, Tommy did as the robot instructed and lay back against the pillows.

Just then, the door of the room swung open, letting in a shaft of sunlight. Tommy blinked and squinted against the sudden glare as a man seated in a wheelchair rolled into the room accompanied by a sour, nasty smell. He couldn’t see the man’s face; it was silhouetted against the brightly lit doorway.

A bedside lamp clicked on.

When his eyes had adjusted, Troy saw the man sitting silently, contemplating him out of small, round, brown eyes. Wild gray unkempt hair stuck out every which way from the top of the man’s head. It matched the gray, wiry hair that started at his chin and spread down his neck and across his cheeks.

He wore an oversized grayish-white t-shirt and an equally large pair of shorts. His arms and shoulders were sinewy and well-muscled. From his shorts, gaunt legs protruded awkwardly, as though they didn’t know what position they were supposed to take. The skin on his legs hung loosely from his bones. His feet were bare.

Attached to the arms of the man’s wheelchair was a shiny metal tray, upon which sat a glass of water, a medicine cup, and Tommy’s wallet. 

The old man cleared his throat. “Thomas Quinn,” he said in a frail, scratchy voice. He picked up Tommy’s wallet from his tray and set it on the bedside table. “I didn’t take anything. I just wanted to know who I picked up off my beach. I dried it for you in the dryer. How are you feeling?”

Tommy open his parched mouth and croaked in a slow Southern U.S. drawl, “Awful. My head.” He winced. Even talking hurt.

“Sorry. I didn’t want Shelley to treat you for pain if you didn’t have any. But I brought you water and some ibuprofen, just in case. Can you swallow?”

“I don’t know.”