Mega 5: Murder Island

by Jake Bible

  “I swear, if he tells us to hold on one more time, I’ll gut him when we get back,” Kinsey said.

  “Hold on.”

  “Oh, you can kiss my ass, ‘Ren,” Kinsey said.

  “What? I didn’t say that,” Darren said. “It didn’t even sound like me.”

  “Didn’t even sound like me.”

  “That one sounded like you,” Kinsey said and gulped loudly. “But that wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No,” Darren said, staring up into the trees. “Shit. Is that the mocking?”

  “Listen, Mr. Chambers and Ms. Thorne, I am revising the plan,” Ballantine said. “Lucy and I will return to the Zodiac and circle around the island. We’ll meet on the beach of that first cove we found. It’ll be considerably faster, not to mention safer, than traipsing through the middle of the jungle.”

  “Ballantine? By mocking, did you mean the birds can copy us?” Darren asked.

  “Copy? Oh, you mean mimic,” Ballantine responded. “Yes, that is one of the ways they mock.”

  “What’s the other way?” Darren asked.

  A small rock came flying down from the trees, hitting Darren high on the left cheekbone.

  “Shit!” Kinsey cried. “Little fuckers!”

  “Have they started throwing objects?” Ballantine asked then sighed. “I did hate it when they’d throw objects.”

  More rocks came flying out of the trees at them. Darren and Kinsey began to shout up at the birds even though they couldn’t even see a hint of a wing. The birds shouted back, mimicking Darren and Kinsey’s speech patterns almost perfectly.

  “This blows chunks,” Kinsey said. “Can it get worse?”

  “Jesus, ‘Sey!” Darren snapped. “Why the fuck would you ask that?”

  It got worse.

  ***

  The black cloud followed so close that Gunnar thought he could feel the thousands of tiny wings beating right near his back. He certainly could hear all the blowflies as they chased him and his trail board up out of the valley and into the jungle. It was a near-deafening hum of insect activity. A monotonous tone of yuck.

  Gunnar leaned to the right, avoiding a spiky-looking plant that he could have sworn had reached for him. That wasn’t supposed to be possible. Not on that island. Ballantine had said that there wasn’t aggressive plant life. Of course, he hadn’t mentioned the blowflies, either, so Gunnar’s confidence in Ballantine wasn’t exactly at its zenith.

  The trail board nearly came out from under Gunnar as it bounced over a large bump in the trail. Gunnar kept his balance, crouching down fast to grip the edge of the board so he didn’t fall off. A handle like for a scooter would have been a good addition. He’d have to tell the elves.

  Not that he planned on getting on the thing ever again. The second he found Darren and Kinsey, he was tossing the trail board into the bushes and forgetting all about it. He’d just tell Moshi he’d lost it. He hated to lie to Moshi, she was good people, but he didn’t want to deal with the damn thing any more than he had to.

  He didn’t want to deal with the cloud of blowflies chasing him, either. No way around that. He just kept moving forward, the image in his glasses saying he was getting closer and closer to Darren and Kinsey with every second.

  Gunnar only hoped that he had more seconds than the cloud of blowflies. He was a doctor and biologist. He knew exactly what blowflies could do to a person. He’d watched the videos on third world health issues where children had to have parts of their bodies excavated of all flesh in order to dig out the maggots.

  He’d even heard of the same happening in the US in the poorer areas of the country. The inner city ghettos, the backwoods of Appalachia, the shanty villages on native reservations. People, not just children, losing limbs, or chunks of limbs, because they lived in such squalor that the blowflies could lay eggs in their exposed skin, allowing the maggots to grow and consume the living flesh.

  Yeah, Gunnar wasn’t into that happening to him.

  So he leaned forward, moving his center of gravity to the front of the trail board, hoping it would allow him to go faster. It did, but it also made him kind of queasy. Not the time to get motion sick, not the time at all.

  He hit another bump and cried out. The trail board was handling the terrain well, but Gunnar wasn’t sure how much more he could handle. His legs burned, his back ached, and the constant movement was giving him vertigo. He saw another bump in the trail ahead and glared at it.

  Then it moved.

  Gunnar’s glare turned to wide eyes filled with fear.

  Not a bump. Not a bump at all. It wasn’t a log or branch. It was obviously a three-foot part of a very large snake. Very large. Not grotesquely large like one of Ballantine’s science experiments gone wrong, but it sure as hell was big.

  Gunnar didn’t have time to see the details of the markings, so he couldn’t identify the snake, but by its girth and length, it was certainly a constrictor of some kind. In the South Pacific, that would mean a python, but knowing Ballantine, it could also be in the boa family. Gunnar wasn’t under any illusion that the insects, and now animals, on the island were natives.

  He really hated Ballantine at that moment. The moment when the trail board hit the bump, the snake, and almost sent him flying off into the underbrush. But Gunnar stayed on. Barely. The trail board seemed to sense that he was about to lose it and it automatically slowed down. Nice trick.

  Of course, slowing down meant that the cloud of blowflies caught up, and Gunnar was soon swatting at the things, keeping them from landing on his exposed skin. All it would take was one or two to pierce his skin and lay its eggs and he’d be digging out the larvae for days.

  The buzzing was insane. It filled his ears, his head, his everything. Gunnar felt like it was some sort of aural pillow pressing against him from all sides. He wanted to scream at the flies, tell them to shut up, but he didn’t dare open his mouth. Too many were flying about his head. Swallowing a blowfly would turn an already shitty day into a considerably worse shitty day.

  Gunnar was so busy swatting at blowflies and trying to stay on his trail board that he didn’t notice two things. The first was the bushes off to his left were moving. A lot. Something was tracking him from inside there. The second was that the trail was following close to a good-sized stream. If Gunnar had been paying attention, he would have noticed glimpses of the stream now and then when the underbrush thinned out enough to afford a view.

  But Gunnar wasn’t paying attention to the stream off to his right or the thing in the bushes to his left. He was smashing blowflies as they landed on his arms, his neck, his face. He was trying to keep from being thrown off the trail board. That was what he was paying attention to.

  Which was why he didn’t notice that the trail was ending, the jungle was ending, the ground underneath him was ending.

  ***

  The sounds of millions of beetle legs scraping against rock echoed throughout the tunnel. It would have been deafening if Shane hadn’t been wearing the helmet he was. Lucky for him, the helmet dampened almost all external sound. Not that it mattered a ton since he could feel the little fuckers under his boots.

  That kind of volume made an impact.

  Shane had zero clue what he was running towards. Again, not that it mattered, since he wasn’t exactly presented with a ton of opportunities. All he could do was keep his feet moving, his legs pumping, his body in motion so that the beetles that scuttled and crawled en masse behind him didn’t catch up.

  The problem with that was he was exhausted. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep his feet moving, his legs pumping, his body in motion. Eventually, the en masse was going to catch up to him if he didn’t find somewhere he could hide. All he needed was a secure location to lay up in while he rested. Maybe catch a twenty-minute power nap. It was the SEAL secret weapon, a twenty-minute power nap. That was all he needed.

  But he was running through a pitch dark tunnel hewn from the rock the island was made of, his glowing blue suit his o
nly illumination, with several thousand very large beetles on his ass. A nap wasn’t in the picture at that moment.

  So Shane kept going. He dug deep, he pulled up every last ounce of energy he had and kept going. No choice, really. Feet, legs, motion. Feet, legs, motion. Go, go, go.

  He was concentrating so hard on willing his body to go that extra few meters, to not give up, to push through the intense cramps that were building in his thighs, that he almost missed the sliver of darkness in the wall of the tunnel. But the beetles were gaining and Shane took a risk and looked back over his shoulder to see how close they were. That was how he caught sight of the sliver of darkness. A sliver that said there was a break in the wall.

  He had half a second to make a decision. If he kept going, then he may miss an opportunity to get out of the tunnel and into somewhere that would let him have those minutes of rest. But, if he slowed down, the beetles would be all over him and he’d end up at the bottom of a beetle pile again except he wouldn’t have any energy left and the beetles would end up squishing him until he could no longer breathe.

  It was a shitty dilemma.

  But it sorted itself out as Shane’s left foot caught on a slight rise in the floor of the tunnel, sending him sprawling onto his hands and knees. He skidded for a couple of feet and miraculously managed not to go head over heels tumbling down the tunnel.

  His decision had been made for him. Shane scrambled back to his feet and hurried towards the dark gap of mystery. He took off his pack and M4 and held them to his sides as he entered the gap.

  It was just wide enough for him to squeeze into. Into. That was key. He didn’t squeeze through the gap since it seemed to go on forever. All he could do was squeeze into it and keep going, walking sideways as he was sandwiched between the rock.

  Shane had enough room that he could swivel his helmeted head on his neck. That was good since it allowed him to see when the beetles reached the gap and came for him. It was bad because it allowed him to see when the beetles reached the gap and came for him. They filled the gap fast. In seconds, he had hundreds of beetles pressing up against his left side, their mandibles trying to grip his body, but finding no purchase because of the suit.

  “Fuck off!” Shane yelled, but he knew it made no difference. The beetles couldn’t understand him, and with the way the suit was built, they probably couldn’t even hear him. Still, it felt good to shout, to let off steam, to do something other than flee. “Fucking fuck off!”

  Their weight grew, and he felt like he was making more progress by being shoved along by the beetles than he was by his own moving, sidestepping legs. Shane knew that inadvertent assist would end the second he broke free of the gap in the tunnel. If he broke free of the gap in the tunnel.

  Then it happened. He was stumbling, falling, arms pinwheeling, legs flailing, body in open air. He had broken free of the gap. The fall was short, only about three feet, and Shane found himself once again on his hands and knees. He braced for the imminent swarming of the beetles all over his body.

  But they never came.

  Shane looked back at the gap he’d fallen out of and saw a couple beetles here and there crawling about, but the main swarm stayed back. That was puzzling.

  Shane stood up, found his pack and M4, strapped them to his back again, and backed slowly away from the gap he’d come through. His eye was locked onto the black gap, waiting for a thousand beetles to come pouring out at him. He waited and waited, but no swarm. Just a couple beetles here and there exploring the edges of the gap then tucking back into the darkness.

  “Okay,” Shane muttered. “Maybe wishes do come true.”

  He turned in a slow circle, but the glow from his suit barely penetrated the space he was in. He looked left, right, and up. Nothing to see. No features or dimensions. Whatever space he was in was large. Very large.

  The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Quite a feat since that hair was sticky with sweat and held tight to his body by the collar that joined the helmet to the suit. Still, it stood up and Shane whipped back around to stare at the gap he’d come through. They were coming. He knew they were. His gut told him the beetles were just building up their numbers so they could overwhelm him in one big swoop.

  Shane braced his legs and tensed his entire body, ready for the attack.

  A beetle appeared at the edge of the gap and he narrowed his eye at it, positive it was only a scout, a hint of what was to come.

  Then the beetle was gone.

  It hadn’t fled back into the gap, it was just gone. Blink and gone.

  Shane took a step towards the gap. Not the brightest move, but the disappearance of the beetle didn’t make sense. His eye had been locked on it. The bug had been a foot away from the edge, nowhere close enough to just pop back out of sight without him noticing. He’d gotten pretty good at tracking the movement of the beetles. He would have seen it leave.

  So where did it go?

  A second beetle appeared and Shane moved closer. He wanted to have a clear view if the damn bug pulled the same disappearing act. It crawled across the rocky surface for a couple seconds, then it was gone.

  But that time, Shane had seen what had happened to it. He leapt back, spun around, and yanked his M4 free from his back. The carbine was all bent up, but Shane was pretty sure it would still work. It was mainly the buttstock assembly that was screwed up. He pulled a pin free and disengaged the buttstock assembly from the lower receiver.

  It wasn’t a safe thing to do with an M4. The kickback from firing would drive the buttstock assembly rod that connected to the lower receiver right into him. He’d have to handle the carbine like a large machine pistol. Grip the handle tight and hold the barrel up front, hoping he could control it enough for some semblance of accuracy.

  Shane watched the darkness. What he’d seen had come from above, he knew that. It was a long, thin leg that had grabbed the beetles, plucking them one at a time off the rock wall. It had been light grey, almost close to white and if he hadn’t been watching closely, he wouldn’t have seen it at all.

  “Come on, come on,” Shane said, not liking being made to wait. “Where are you, new bug?”

  He was certain it was a new bug. Had to be. The leg had been so thin, almost threadlike, and he didn’t know of anything except for an insect that would have a leg that thin. Of course, he didn’t know of any insect that had a leg that long or large. But the impossibility of size was irrelevant. He was trapped on a Ballantine island. Of course shit was going to be impossibly large. That’s how Ballantine islands rolled.

  Shane began to walk forward, heading deeper into the darkness and away from the gap behind him. If it wouldn’t come to him, then he’d go to it. He was already up shit creek without a paddle, canoe, life vest, or even a stitch of clothing. Might as well get things over with and find out what beetle-snagging bug lurked in the dark.

  Racking the slide, Shane lifted his messed up M4 and hoped it fired when he needed it to. He kept moving, taking cautious step after cautious step. At least he wasn’t running anymore. The cramps had lessened somewhat, but not completely. He was dehydrated and he knew he’d be in pain until he got some fluids in him.

  Except he ended up losing fluids, not gaining them, as he took three more steps and finally came to the far wall of the space. A little bit of pee trickled out of him and his suit filled with the sharp smell of urine. Not that he cared. He was too busy trying not to panic.

  There, on the wall, was the unmistakable patterned webbing of a spider. Almost perfectly round, the web was a zig-zag of about thirty feet in diameter. Hanging from the web were dozens of empty beetle shells with hundreds more piled on the ground beneath.

  “Nope,” was all Shane could say as he watched the web begin to quiver. “Nope, nope, nope.”

  The quivering grew stronger and the owner of the web appeared. Ten feet across at its abdomen, the spider was a glossy black that was broken by a narrow stripe of yellow across its back.

  Shane wanted to open fire
. He really wanted to open fire. But for the first time in a very, very long time, his body was frozen in fear. Not very SEAL of him, but there it was. He was terrified that if he even twitched his trigger finger, the spider would be on him in seconds.

  He was fairly certain it was watching him. Of course it was. He was dressed in a glowing blue suit. He was the main attraction in what had to have been a pretty dreary life for a spider stuck in a cave in a tunnel, underground with nothing to occupy itself with except the constant snacking on stray beetles that happened by. Now it had something else to snack on and break up the monotony of the beetle buffet.

  Shane had to do something. He knew that. He couldn’t stand there forever, waiting for the spider to make its move. Once the thing did that, it would probably be too late for Shane to make his own move.

  He tensed his finger and prepared to squeeze. The spider tensed its legs and looked like it was preparing to leap from the web.

  It was a race of tension.

  ***

  Darren was far from an expert on ornithology. His field was marine biology. Especially when it came to whales and all members in the cetacean family. But, while birds weren’t totally outside his realm of study, since he knew quite a lot about marine species, he had zero clue what species he was looking at as he and Kinsey slowly set Thorne’s stretcher down on the ground.

  Whatever they were, there were a lot of them and they had he and Kinsey completely surrounded. He double-checked once the stretcher was out of his hands and he could turn in a very slow, very non-threatening circle to take in what they were up against.

  “‘Ren? Talk to me,” Kinsey whispered.

  A couple of the birds echoed her words exactly, even down to the tone of voice and inflection. It was like hearing multiple recordings played back at the same time, each slightly off in timing to give a fractured echo effect.

  “Maybe crows?” Darren guessed. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe crows? I don’t know,” several birds said.