Jin’s suggestions that all this had to do with the fungus or spores or whatever the hell he called that crap was ridiculous. He might as well have suggested Big Foot was real and that he was a space alien, that’s how ridiculous all this was. Or at least that was Burke’s initial thinking. He was thinking about this as he debated how to tell Jin what coroner Harold Randolf had said about exhuming bodies to look for evidence of spores. Burke found himself with a better understanding of why Randolf gave him those weird looks whenever he obsessed over the brutal killings as he argued that some type of werewolf might be behind it all. Now he knew why Randolf thought he was crazy.
Stupid cell phone, Burke thought as he looked up and noticed some branches snapped and bent downwards. He had seen that earlier on his walk and had assumed it was done by a moose. There were a lot of moose on Oakwood Island, but he assumed he might have seen tracks or something. Shouldn’t he have? A moose is a heavy animal and so should leave tracks in what was pretty soft ground. When he examined the branches closely, he came to realize that they were about the same height as the last ones he saw; around shoulder height, perfectly within reach of someone as they walked past, perhaps wanting to leave a trail to find the location again. Were these a simple form of trail markers? He tried to recall if Jin had mentioned this when they spoke last, but didn’t think he had.
Burke adjusted his glasses and looked at the compass app which was back to pointing at what he had previously assumed was the correct North. He decided the snapped and bent branches were roughly in the direction he was going and felt they were there for a reason. He trusted them just a smidge more than the technology on his phone and so he continued to follow them.
Burke continued his hike as best he could. He had slipped, stumbled and staggered during much of his hike because of the smooth soles of his worn dress shoes. As he walked, he checked the compass app on his phone, still uncertain if it would help him or fail him. Trying to point the cell in various directions to get a proper reading, he didn’t see the large mossy rock that the tip of his dress shoe hit hard. Tumbling over the large rock, his body went down fast. He landed face down on the mossy forest floor, bits and pieces of branches and leaves stuck on his scrapped hands which he had put out to try to avoid the fall.
Burke cursed at himself for not having the proper footwear for a hike in the woods as he lifted himself up on hands and knees and got into a kneeling position. He checked the most important thing on his person, his package of Peter Jackson menthol cigarettes. The pack seemed a bit crushed, so he pulled it out to examine the contents. The pack, which only contained eight cigarettes in total, now had three broken, two slightly bent and three that survived unscathed. He sighed as he took one of the broken ones, cast aside the broken tip and placed the balance of it in his mouth. He patted his pockets, found his Zippo and lit the short cigarette. He inhaled the smoke deeply, coughed and exhaled in between more coughs. He examined himself, saw how dirty he was and so didn’t really mind the damp feeling he was getting beneath his knees as he knelt on the ground. He removed his glasses and decided he had no clean bit of shirt or jacket to clean them with and so put them back on. Large spots of drying mud spatter and dirt speckled his eyesight through the large lenses.
While taking another drag of his short cigarette, he realized that he must have dropped his cell phone when he fell as he had held it when he had gone down. Burke saw the phone on the ground, a few feet before him. He got to his feet, dusted himself off some as he retrieved his cell phone that lay on the damp moss. When he retrieved his phone, he noticed another phone on the ground only a few feet from his.
He pocketed his cell phone and picked up the other one, all while wondering if this was Jin Hong’s lost cell phone. After a few tries to activate it, he realized the battery had to have died. He tried to recall what Jin’s phone looked like but couldn’t remember any details about it. Although, who else had been trampling about these woods recently? It has to be Jin’s, he thought. The thought of swapping batteries occurred to him, to see if the phone really was Jin’s, but his was an older model and this one was newer. He couldn’t even tell how to open the damned thing, so that was out of the question.
He puffed at his cigarette, which was already mostly gone as he looked about. Burke froze as he saw a weird shape in a tree nearby. Walking forward a few steps, he saw in front of him, dangling from a tree branch a large decomposing animal that looked like what had been a rabbit. Suspended from what appeared to be its mouth, the dead rabbit dangled, its stomach completely burst open with a few small pieces of entrails dangling from the gaping hole.
“Lord Almighty,” Burke uttered. “What the fuck is that?”
Burke looked at the cell phone in his hand, the one he had just found and knew right away that this was what Jin must have been referring to. He dropped his cigarette and stepped on it until he was satisfied he had properly extinguished it. Jin must have found this, he thought. That’s why he panicked. The rabbit hung in the tree like the zombie ants of the Peruvian Amazon. He remembered Jin speaking of ants only and nothing else. Nothing of this size, he thought.
That’s when he saw movement in the forest up ahead. Something had moved, he was sure of it. He watched carefully until he saw it again.
“Jin!” he shouted as he marched forward, not daring a run in his poor choice of shoes. He walked on until he saw a young man he had never seen before, who was in the middle of climbing a large maple tree. Burke noticed the boy had one bare, bloody foot, while the other wore a filthy, torn sock. The teenage boy looked in shambles as he scrambled up the tree with ease, leaving bloody prints wherever he touched the tree trunk. The boy turned his head and Burke saw a blank expression on his face. From this distance it was hard to discern, but it seemed that the boy showed no strain in his efforts to climb this tall tree. The boy looked up at a tree branch which was out of reach. Shifting his position on the tree, he launched himself at the branch, hands dangling at his sides as he did so. Burke looked in shock at the impossible feat as he watched the boy clutch the branch in his mouth as his body swayed from the exertion.
Burke stood dumbfounded as he watched the boy struggle to get a better hold while his arms merely dangled at his sides. As the swaying stopped, the boy’s discolored skin stretched out, gradually separating into sections of flesh, until the boy’s stomach burst open. The t-shirt he had been wearing was forced up by the outpouring of his blackened entrails and what looked like pollen which floated on the gentle breeze in the wooded area.
“What the fuck?” Burke muttered, wondering if he had finally lost his mind or if he was really seeing this. He staggered back a few steps in horror of what he had just witnessed. Finally, he understood why Jin was so worried about the spread of this mutated strain of zombie fungus as he watched some of the bits that had just come out of the boy’s stomach float towards him.
Burke tugged and pulled at his shirt to cover his nose and mouth as he saw more of the particles floating in the air around him. Stepping back, he saw another body dangling from a tree branch on his right. A mature woman by the look of it hung the same way as the teenage boy did. Her stomach had been opened in the same way, with putrid pus and some entrails hanging from the opening. The rotting flesh of her face was distorted by the pull of gravity and she was not recognizable. Her long black hair was matted and only partially covered a visible gash she had suffered, which was now a bulbous mound of oozing pus. Not far behind her hung a bald man in a white coat in the same manner. Burke recognized him as the pharmacist who had recently questioned his sleeping pill refills. His flesh was not quite as stretched nor as decomposed yet, but he was very bloated. His hands hung large, almost like balloons. Two of the fingers had been gnawed off, more than likely by one of the critters he had seen in the forest. In the place of fingers there were now hanging sacs, which no doubt contained more of the spores, soon to be released in the air. Burke’s mind raced.
How was
this possible?
What could he do now?
Burke staggered backwards, tripped on a tree root and landed on his butt. When he did this, he got an idea of the scope of this discovery. On his left side, hanging from a tree was Grady, the idiot that had skipped out on Shelley at the restaurant. Where his eyes had been, there were two large formed sacs that started just above his nose and spread up and covered his entire forehead. One of them seemed to pulsate. It was no doubt ready to release its contents to spread itself. The kid’s mouth was open, attached to the tree branch. Burke could see his cheeks, elongated, blue and full of swollen veins which hung loosely down and dripped a thick yellow pus.
Not far from him, Burke recognized Jin Hong, hanging from a tree like the ants he had been so fascinated with. Burke shook his head, not able to control his fear anymore. “No, no, no,” he said aloud, quietly at first, then yelled, “Nooo!” He did not know what to do. Jin was the one that had the answers. Now here he was, hanging on a branch in the forest, his dead eyes staring out into nothing. Other than his opened stomach, his body was still intact, no sign of decomposition yet, but Burke knew it would come and he had no desire to see that.
He recognized the lady on the right of Jin too. He recalled seeing a picture of her in The Oakwood Chronicler. That was Peggy Martin. Had to be, he thought, as he watched in horror as the lower half of her body slowly detached from the upper half in a slow and slick motion, the sound of distended and rotting skin stretched too far, causing it to fall to the forest floor in a splatter. There, it exploded as it hit the ground, into a puddle of pus, blood, black entrails and rotten organs.
“Fuck me,” Burke muttered as his mind swam with anxiety over what he had found. Turning, he felt the rush of vomit coming up. He spewed and spat. The mixed smell of his puke and the putrid bodies rotting in the heat bringing about another sudden bout of nausea and vomiting. Blinking away tears, he wiped off his mouth and covered his face up to his cheeks again, to avoid breathing in any of the particles that was still highly visible in the air.
This can’t be real, he thought. How could it be? Was he going crazy, like Randolf had implied when he last spoke to him?
Still seated on the mossy ground, Burke heard a rustling sound coming from behind him. He felt panic wash over him. As he spun around to look behind him, he heard a similar sound to his left. He spun to look there but saw nothing. Then as if out of nowhere, a large, weirdly deformed rat appeared before him. The rat raised itself on its hind legs and hissed at him like a cat. Burke scampered backwards as the rat’s neck jutted forward and with its mouth open, it sprayed his face with a hot and sticky rancid liquid.
Burke scrambled to his feet, staggered until he found his footing and ran in the direction he had come. He ran a short distance before tripping on something and falling forward yet again, this time scraping his right elbow which took most of the impact.
He ignored the pain as he pulled off his jacket as well as his glasses and wiped at his face. The sticky spit felt like it irritated his skin as he wiped off as much as he could. Thank God his glasses had stopped that shit from getting into his eyes, he thought as he wiped it as best as he could. Hearing the shuffling sound coming from behind him, panic set in as he got to his feet and ran as fast as he could.
Chapter 23
The Return
Jack’s hair fluttered in the wind under the rim of his hat, winds that had grown in strength as he limped up the beaten path. Each twin walked by his sides, each one of them holding him by the hand willingly. The pain in Jack’s chest was back, although not as strong as before. Somehow, he knew that this was all stress related. He had come to realize this before, and now more than ever, as he marched towards what would be a life changing event for him. Once he had done this and saved the people of Oakwood Island from evil, he would never be able to return to any kind of normal life. Not this time. Nobody would understand why he, a man many loved, had felt it necessary to kill children. Nobody understood that these children were touched by an evil that simply wouldn’t let them go. An evil that clung to their family and had been passed on generation after generation. The good people of Oakwood Island didn’t know anything about curses and evil, nor would they believe him if he tried to explain it to them. Only a select few had knowledge of these things, and Jack was the only one with enough courage to face it.
He intended to sever the tie of evil to the Jenkins family once and for all. The children he needed to kill to do so were now leading him to the place where he had to do it. This confused Jack, as he had expected to have to drag them kicking and screaming to the clearing on the cliff. Instead, they clutched his hands in theirs and led him up the path. Patrick, walking on Jack’s left side, led him by one hand with his other hand outstretched out of habit to make sure he wouldn’t walk into anything. Lily on his right side, walked with determination as she clutched in her other hand what was left of a Barbie doll, a torso and leg.
“I’m gonna be like my Mommy,” Lily said.
Jack wondered what the little girl meant. Was she referring to the evil that had held a grasp on her mother, like it had done to her grandmother as well? Was she referring to the evil that clung to her and had taken the lives of the Ketchum couple? Or was she referring to the fact that Norah was now dead. Was she referring to the fact that she, too, would soon be dead? What do the children know and how do they know this? Jack wondered.
The crow flew high overhead as they walked. It carried something in its claws, something oblong and white. Jack could feel it watching from above. He wondered what it saw. Was the spirit of Sparrow Whitefeather here with him? Would she guide him? Would she help him? A part of him regretted not ending it at the Cudmore house. It would have been much easier to bear, to end it quickly. Somehow, he knew that had he done this the evil would have continued. Unsure how it could with no twins to continue the lineage, he hadn’t dared risk it. The crow that had guided him all of his life had shown him this place. It must have done so for a reason. Something deep inside him knew this was where the evil needed to be stopped. The bird swooped down using the winds to glide and Jack saw that the bird carried something in its beak as it disappeared over the trees that were now swaying in the wind. Somehow Jack knew the crow would be waiting for him at the clearing near the cliffs edge. Waiting where he believed it all started long ago.
As the twins led Jack into the windy clearing, he marveled at the sight before him. He had wandered much of Oakwood Island which meant he had been to this area before and remembered the clearing and the view of the old lighthouse off in the distance. Today was different though. The area he remembered did not look like how he found it today. He remembered the firm soil beneath the grassy area, as if just beneath it was packed soil and bedrock. He recalled the trees that surrounded the edge of the area but none had ever grown in the center of the small clearing.
What lay before him, just beyond the swaying trees was a grassless patch of dirt. Jack smelled the combination of sea air and fresh soil as if it had been recently exposed. He saw bugs and worms wriggling in the fresh earth, many burrowing themselves back into the ground. He and Lily watched as Patrick cocked his head, listening as the winds became stronger here, swaying the large trees behind them. Jack watched as a strong gust blew more dirt away from the clearing.
The crow flew low and dropped what it had been carrying in its beak. The object landed in the middle of the circle of dirt and then the crow landed on it. The bird cawed loudly as it stood on what Jack knew was his grandmother’s bone dagger. The bird pecked at the bone and cawed repeatedly.
“We’re here,” Patrick said as he stopped before Jack.
Chapter 24
A Smoke and a Promise
Burke’s addiction to tobacco had never been something he thought much about. He smoked. Deal with it. That’s what he had told his wife, not long before she told him she wanted a divorce. That wasn’t why she divorced him, but it
was never something that she liked about him. A former smoker herself, she had given him a lot of slack when it came to his smoking. She had begged him to quit, not for her, but for his own health. She knew he smoked away his stress. The job, which was the main reason for his habit, was why she eventually did divorce him. Right now though, wheezing and his head spinning, he thought maybe she was right after all. Smoking may just end up killing him.
He had run as far and as fast as he could which turned out to be, not far at all. Pushing himself on the hike had left him wheezing for breath for most of the way there but especially on the run back. With the vehicles now in sight, he wheezed and struggled for breath. Looking back behind him, he figured those things that looked like giant rats on steroids hadn’t followed him. At least he didn’t think they had. The fire in his lungs felt like it was diminishing finally as he walked towards Ocean’s Edge Road on legs that felt like rubber.
Once at the SUV, he turned his back to it, leaned against it and slumped down to the ground. He stretched his legs out and sat with his back against the vehicle. Out of habit, he pulled the pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket. The pack was damp with the same perspiration that had soaked his shirt through and through. Opening the pack, he saw every single cigarette was partially crushed from the many tumbles and stumbles due to his trek in the woods in bad footwear. He blamed the bad footwear, although poor health had more to do with it. He struggled to admit the second part, but there was no kidding himself. He pulled the most intact piece of cigarette from the box and put it between his lips. He crushed the box and tossed it on the ground. He patted his pockets until he found his Zippo. He lit the piece of cigarette which struggled to burn as it was dampened with perspiration. Burke launched into a coughing fit that had the world around him spinning out of control. He gasped for breath as the world dimmed for a moment as he came incredibly close to passing out. He flicked the cigarette onto the asphalt of Ocean’s Edge Road as he hocked up phlegm and spat.
The Awakening Page 17
