Anansi Island

by Christian Cantrell

  Her attention was divided between getting her hand into the thick cowhide glove she kept in her game bag and picking a path through the dense trees. She paused to find the old wooden deer blind she used as a landmark to indicate when to veer south when she was startled by movement on a branch beside her. Her eyes struggled to separate the well camouflaged disturbance from its background, and when she finally made sense of it, she was simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the size of the praying mantis. At close to eight inches long from bulging green eyes to the tip of its folded wings, it was one of the largest insects Laurel had ever seen.

  It was easily coaxed onto her gloved hand, and then it moved hesitantly up her arm, swaying from side to side in order to help it distinguish nearby objects from objects further away. It's two long whip-like antennae individually explored the air in front of Laurel's face.

  And then the mantis was gone, locked in the spiky vice of another mantis hanging upside down in the same tree Laurel had just reached for. It took Laurel a moment to grasp that the second mantis was several times larger than its prey. The smaller insect had already been torn apart, but it continued to twitch as it was cannibalized, the mandibles of the huge hunter deftly separating the soft innards from the exoskeleton. Laurel could feel warm blood running down her arm, and she could hear it splatter on the leaves by her feet as it dripped from her elbow.

  Her eyes gradually separated the dozens of other mantises from the branches and leaves around her, several of which were easily as long as she was tall. The blood on her arm turned cold and thickened and the drops had slowed by the time she was able to move again. As she began to take a step back, the black pupils in the melon-sized eyes above her shifted and regarded her with a perception and intelligence that caught Laurel's breath. It dropped the empty husk of the juvenile mantis, lifted its arms, and its massive body began to sway.

  Laurel had barely retreated beyond what she judged was the insect's range when she heard the horn signaling the last ferry's departure.

  PART FIVE

  I have a bad habit," Barrett said. The walkway between the administrative trailers and the living quarters was enclosed by an archway of heavy chain-link. The UV filters over the lamps above them made the artificial light soft and pink. Barrett had removed a long leather wallet from the pocket of his cargo pants and unzipped it into a cigar smoking kit. "Do you mind?"

  "Are you kidding?" Laurel said. The bottle of wine was in her hand, swinging against her leg as she walked. It was partially re-corked and three-quarters empty. "My father used to smoke a cigar every night after work. I love the smell."

  "Really?" He used a guillotine-style cutter to clip off an end and let it fall to the oyster-shell path. "Most women find it offensive."

  "I guess you're with the right girl," Laurel said.

  Barrett offered her the opened case. "Care for one yourself?"

  "I wouldn't go that far," Laurel said. "I'll just enjoy yours second-hand."

  They stopped walking while he applied a small butane torch to the foot of his cigar and rotated it as he sucked. "The smoke will keep the bugs away," he said between draws.

  "I could have used a few of those last week," Laurel said.

  Their pace slowed while Barrett smoked. He blew sweet thick clouds ahead of them which hung in the humid air. They couldn't see the island in the dark, but they could hear the rhythmic cacophony emanating from its canopy of trees.

  "Do you mind if I ask you something personal?" Barrett said. "Something not related to all this?"

  Laurel was intrigued. "You may."

  Barrett wrapped an index finger around the cigar and took it away from his face. "How did you end up out there? Originally, I mean. Wasn't it lonely? Didn't you feel isolated?"

  Laurel smiled as she thought about how to answer. "That was sort of the point."

  "I see," Barrett said. He waited for her to continue.

  "I got engaged in my last year of graduate school, but it didn't exactly work out."

  "What happened, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "He was a musician," Laurel said, "and let's just say he got lonely on the road."

  Laurel could see Barrett nodding deeply, his cigar slowly bobbing. "I'm sorry to hear that."

  "So was I," Laurel said. "Anyway, he ended up moving in with some painter in New York, and I took the most remote and isolated job I could find. I'm pretty sure Anansi is the last place on earth you can't get a cell phone signal."

  "Do you think you'll ever go back?"

  She looked down at the cork and tried to force it further down into the bottle with her thumb. "No. It was time for a change, anyway. If there's anything good to come out of all this, it's that I needed something to give me a push. It was time for me to stop hiding."

  They were in front of Laurel's trailer. The sides were plated with thick sheets of metal armor, and there were steel mesh panels welded over the windows.

  "That's not the only good thing," Barrett said.

  Laurel prompted him with an inquisitive look.

  "You met me."

  She could feel her face flush as she looked up at him. She waited for him to lean toward her, but he didn't.

  "That's true," she finally said. "Anyway, to answer your question, yes, it was lonely. And yes, I did feel isolated. And yes, I was running away."

  "I guess that doesn't surprise me," Barrett said from around his cigar, his soft brown eyes smiling down at her, "since the first time I saw you out there, you were sure as hell running from something."

  PART SIX

  The nature center and the loft above it weren't safe. The flue damper didn't fully close which meant there was no way to block off the old fireplace's chimney, and when Laurel left candles and lanterns burning after the power went out on her first night alone on the island, most of the building's windows had been smashed in by heavy buzzing black masses. In the morning, she couldn't find the tools or materials to board them up, so she filled a backpack with food, water, and whatever medical supplies she could find, clipped a radio to her belt, and walked into the woods.

  There were deer blinds all over the island from before it was a refuge and she used them at night. Most of them still had small wooden doors which could be latched from the inside, and she coated any openings that couldn't be blocked off with lemon eucalyptus oil. She had a bright LED lantern with fresh batteries suspended from her pack which she used at dusk while preparing her sleeping space, but it had to be off by sunset.

  She did her best to get some sleep at night between the exploratory knocking and scratching of hooked legs against the wooden walls around her, and the interspersed rhythmic buzzes and screeches of mating calls. In the mornings, she changed the dressing on her arm and covered it with a thick layer of antibiotic cream. She knew she hadn't gotten all the debris out of the fissure — probably remnants of insects the mantis had eaten — and the tissue around the wound continued to redden and streak. Before leaving her hide, she ate lightly, made sure she was hydrated, rubbed lemon eucalyptus oil into her skin, and waited for the sun to fully scale the tree line.

  On the ground, there were dew-coated webs stretched between trees with giant curled husks and torn bloody hides wrapped and suspended and slowly rotating in the morning breeze. She broke through them with rocks and heavy sticks on her way down to the beach where she built fires, watched for boats, and used a piece of broken mirror from the nature center's bathroom to flash patches of sunlight at the mainland. She allowed herself ten minutes out of every hour to listen on the radio and blindly broadcast her location.

  On her eighth day, when the medical supplies were gone and her arm began to smell and produce pale yellow puss, she traveled east to explore the far side of island. She hadn't seen a single boat in Bogue Sound all week, so she hoped to signal a tanker, freighter, or a trawler working beyond the quarantined waters in the Atlantic. As she was crossing what she judged to be roughly the center of the island, something hard caught her toe and she stumble
d. She cleaned the obstruction off with her her boot, and when she found that it was metal, she got down on her knees and swept the surface clean with the palm of her good arm. Under the wet leaves was a heavy metal hatch, set askew on top of what looked like a giant concrete barnacle.

  The hatch was heavy, but it lifted without resistance, and enough sunlight penetrated the tunnel to illuminate the top few rungs of a ladder bolted to the concrete. She expected the stagnant and pungent smells associated with a utility access, but the air that rose from the hole was clean and dry and cool. She doubted she would find supplies down there, but at the very least, it might provide a safer place to sleep.

  The lantern threw enough light down the tunnel that she could see the end of the shaft. The bottom looked clean and dry and flat — more like a floor than the bottom of a cylindrical pipe. She knew she should close the hatch behind her to keep anything from following her down, but the light it admitted into the underground passageway would be an effective beacon if she needed to get out quickly. She poured lemon eucalyptus oil around the perimeter of the opening, and left the hatch folded back on its hinge.

  The floor was some sort of sandy stone block, continuing up the sides to her shoulders where it met an archway of corrugated metal. There was no moisture or moss or even mold between the stones, and the metal was free of corrosion. Whatever the structure was, it hadn't been abandoned for long, and it had clearly been well maintained.

  Laurel moved slowly and methodically through the tunnels, memorizing her turns and replaying them in reverse to keep herself calm. She found openings that led to living quarters which contained low springy cots and simple wooden shelves stacked with clean folded scrubs and gowns. The bathroom fixtures were stainless steel and connected to actual plumbing rather than chemical tanks. She tested the water in one of the tiny sinks, and found that it ran both hot and cold. The mirror above the faucet was warped polished metal and it distorted her pale and grimy face.

  The hallway she followed opened into a space so large that the domed ceiling was supported at its center by a massive concrete block pillar. Her lantern couldn't illuminate the entire space, so she walked slowly along the perimeter where there were workstations positioned against the walls interspersed with tall racks of neatly cabled servers. She followed the thick bundles of wires up and found that they ran along suspended metal catwalks toward the center of room like giant spokes. The machines were quiet and their LEDs were dark, their black metal surfaces cool to the touch.

  She stopped at a workstation made up of three wide monitors in a half-hexagonal configuration surrounding a black keyboard, a large glass touchpad, and what she recognized from the labs at school as a digital chemical analysis scanner. She tested a few keys on the keyboard, but the monitors stayed dark.

  There were steel doors between the workstations with heavy metal latches and dark powerless keypads. The door beside her had the words "Lab 257" etched into its textured surface. She punched a few keys on the electronic lock, but there was no reaction. The latch levered toward her when she yanked it, and the underground space rang with the sound of a tight seal being broken. The heavy door swung surprisingly easily on its massive hinges, and the air behind it was warm and wet and had the unmistakable sweet and acrid essence of both living and decaying organic matter.

  The room might have been as large as the cavern behind her, but with a low ceiling and a maze of glare from her light striking the surfaces of dozens of long aquariums arranged in rows of metal shelving. She approached the closest enclosure as she extended her lantern and peered at what looked like nothing but dark wet soil. She followed the length of the tank and stopped when her light caught fat purple rings of mucus pressed against the glass. Although she could only see a portion of the segmented body, she knew that the earthworm inside had the girth of a fully grown python.

  The tank below it contained several spiky pieces of broken orange and black limbs. Laurel leaned down so she could see the top of the tank where there was a massive flat amber centipede with its dozens of needle-like legs clamped to the wire mesh lid. Its antennae twitched under Laurel's gaze and she jerked away.

  She held the light close to her injured arm and could see the pink fluid soaking through the gauze wrap and smell the fetid odor of infection. It throbbed all the way up to her shoulder, and she knew if she didn't get the wound properly irrigated, she would start to feel the chill of fever soon as the infection became systemic. She needed a bottle of saline, iodine, alcohol, or hydrogen peroxide, and she needed tweezers and sterile dressings. If she was going to live long enough to get off the island, she needed the kinds of supplies generally stocked in a lab.

  She couldn't bring herself to walk between the rows of tanks, so she left her backpack on the floor by the door, pressed herself against the wall, and began skirting the perimeter of the room. The walls were concrete and she felt the cold, rough surface pick at her T-shirt as she moved. She turned the first corner and continued to shuffle, lifting her eyes only long enough to look for a cabinet or a supply closet and not allowing them to focus on the things inside the walls of tanks that were close enough in front of her to reach out and touch. The emerald green of stagnant, algae-filled water in a long tall tank finally caught her attention, and a wide glassy eye floating in the murkiness shifted and tilted as it watched her pass.

  The shelves stopped and the room began to open up. She felt her back transition from concrete to a smooth wall of glass, but she didn't turn to see what was behind her until she felt the surface begin to vibrate. When she swung around and lifted the lantern, she saw through the glare that the other side of the glass was covered with a moving gray patch which she rapidly separated into pairs of massive compound eyes and long complex twitching mouthparts and then the huge grey hunches of mosquitoes the size of crows. The insects were leaving the mounds of gaunt hoofed carcasses locked in the observation room with them and congregating on the glass, attracted by the warmth of living, circulating blood.

  She backed slowly away from the window into the opening behind her and watched the furious vibrating shape dissipate as her heat signature faded from the glass, and then she stopped when she felt something stabbing at the back of her scalp. When she whirled around, some of her hair was still caught in the long stiff needles protruding from a thick jointed leg. The spider in front of her was obviously dead, lying on its back on a metal cart, its twisted gnarled legs curled up over its body and fat abdomen like a giant severed hand. There was movement in its appendages and she could see hundreds of tiny black mites swarming among the hairs and through pin-prick holes in the exoskeleton and into the tendons and rotting meat beneath. When she felt movement on her shin above her sock, she looked down and saw that the floor and her boots were swarming with thousands of the same black dots.

  As soon as she began reflexively slapping at her legs, Laurel realized that she had released the lantern. She heard it hit the floor, and in the instant darkness, she heard the additional sounds of its components hitting and skidding across the concrete. She fell back in the blackness with her eyes opened wide and began kicking against the biting and pinching that had spread from her ankles up to her knees, and then she felt her foot connect with something that was at first solid, but then gave as the wheels of the cart skidded. The heavy mass on top of it fell and hit Laurel's legs, and with the momentum of the cart being jerked out from under it, the hairy rotting carcass rolled up over her.

  Laurel's shrieks echoed in the dark. As she flailed and scrambled, she felt her feet connecting with shelves and heard the impact of shattering glass around her. The mites were on her hands and wrists and forearms now, and she whimpered as she slapped at her infected wound. Some part of her knew that she should try to recover the pieces of the lantern and get the batteries back in, but she couldn't stop herself from scrambling away back toward the wall of mosquitoes and then crawling back down along the perimeter of the room where she felt for her backpack and then the metal door and finally the thi
ck steel handle that levered into place and sealed everything inside.

  Laurel didn't know how much longer she was in the bunker, or how she navigated in the dark, but when she saw a sliver of white light a long way away from her at the end of what must have been a hallway, she pulled herself up and ran and pushed through the door and was blinded by the brightness of the sun. She could feel sand giving beneath her boots as she ran onto the beach, and then she heard shouting from all around her. When she felt someone grab her and hold her and tell her that everything was ok and that she was safe now, she pushed her head against him and screamed and sobbed into his chest.

  PART SEVEN

  Laurel found two small glasses in a cabinet in her trailer's tiny kitchen and she divided the last of the wine. They sat behind the small square laminate table in the corner on built-in padded benches. The fluorescent white halo of light above them buzzed and ticked.

  "There's one more thing I need to ask you," Barrett said. "I need to know about the bunker."

  Laurel looked down at the table and swished the wine around the inside of her glass. "Have your men gone down there yet?"

  Barrett shook his head. "We're not authorized. According to the DoD, it's an old prototype fallout shelter built in the 50's, and none of our concern."

  Laurel laughed without looking up. "It's no fallout shelter," she told Barrett. "And it certainly wasn't built in the 50's."

  "I figured as much," Barrett said. He waited for her to continue, but she didn't. "What do you think it is?"