The Island - Part 2 (Fallen Earth) (12 page)

I looked up at Elsie and nodded. “Tomorrow, after we bury Zachary, after you call the Judge, we’ll 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 g
ot 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.

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.