Apocalypse Island

by Hall, Mark Edward

  No matter, in the days that followed Wolf held close to him the belief that eventually he would be better able to understand his condition and conquer it. So, he did his best to ignore the signs, even as they became more insistent. He stuck pretty much to his resolve, abandoning his social life, heading directly home after his gigs and cuffing himself to the bedpost.

  By now even Siri had abandoned him. She’d stopped visiting him in his bed to offer sexual comfort and cryptic warnings.

  So he fell down a few times, his need for love...no, he could not call it love; his need for copulation outweighing all his other better instincts. He was a man after all, and his needs—despite his sickness—were powerful. For nearly five years in Warren he’d resorted to his less-than-gratifying hand. Now he would not be denied the pleasures of the opposite sex. He took great care, however, on the nights he did choose a mate from the many that frequented the downtown clubs, to stay sober, to stay alert, to be aware at all times of his actions.

  But all that changed on a cold, wet and windy night in mid October following a particularly grueling gig. He went home drunk and exhausted and thoroughly sick of trying to stay awake. He had stopped taking the stimulants two days before. He fumbled out of his clothes, tumbled into bed, cuffed his left wrist to the bedpost, and immediately fell into a deep and troubled sleep.

  Chapter 16

  In the dream it was night and he was wandering along a muddy road carrying a dead woman in his arms as a cold rain fell around him.

  He could see everything quite clearly but knew that the eyes he was seeing through were not his eyes. They belonged to a monster, a large and hairy beast with hands the size of baseball gloves. He knew the monster, of course. It had been a part of his psyche for as long as he could remember. Unfortunately he’d never known why.

  No matter. The dream was upon him with a vengeance and try as he might he could not escape it. In the dream he wept as he carried the woman; great alligator tears coursed down his hairy cheeks as choking sobs escaped him. He wanted to cry out with the injustice of what had been done to this woman, but alas, there was no one nearby to hear him, and even if there had been, he would not have been understood, because he was incapable of translating his thoughts into words.

  The dead woman wore no clothes and he could see the livid cross-shaped cuts on her torso. He could not look her in the face. He thought if he had to look at her face he would surely go mad.

  Now the rain had ceased and a cold wind had picked up. He reached a place on the muddy road where a line of old telegraph poles ran. Beyond the poles was a deep ditch in which ran an abandoned railroad spur, rusted and decayed by the ravages of time and the elements. On the opposite side of the road mounds of trash lay in heaps. He knew that this was where the city dumped its trash and buried it over with soil like some cruel illusion.

  He stopped and carefully set the dead woman down onto the ground. He went to his knees beside her, bowed his head and wept.

  Afterward he stood and surveyed the telegraph poles, looking for just the right one. When he saw it he proceeded to extract several lengths of coiled rope from the pocket of his soiled sweatpants. He went to the pole, reached up and was about to tie the first length of rope to the pole’s cross piece when the lights of an automobile came bouncing along the road toward him. He ran back to where the dead woman lay, and in his confusion dropped the coils of rope onto the muddy road surface. He picked up the body, carried her to the opposite side of the road, placed her in a small, wet hollow and quickly covered her over with debris. Then, in a panic he lumbered away from the scene, down the embankment and across the rusted railroad tracks, up the other side to a large field of yellow swale grass. He plodded across the field, toward a bright blue light at the end of some inconceivable tunnel. And as he ran, everything around him began fading to black. The blue light drew him like a beacon and he stayed focused on it even as he tried to ignore the darkness that swelled around him. Despite the darkness, he knew that if he could reach the light everything would be all right.

  Chapter 17

  A loud and syncopated pounding in his head startled him, and Wolf came awake gagging and choking, his throat ragged and sore, his body covered in slimy sweat.

  He was no longer cuffed to the bedpost. The realization startled him. But the pounding, which was like a pulse, would not cease. God, it hurt like hell, each beat a hammer blow, threatening to crack his skull like the shell of an egg and dislodge his brain.

  “What in the name of God—?” Then it struck him. He knew what the pounding was. Someone was using a fist to hammer on his door. He pulled the sheets back and slipped unsteadily out of bed staggering through the living room toward the door. The pounding would not cease. “I’m coming!” he called through the loud racket, but words caused jolts of pain to slam through his skull.

  He slipped back the chain lock and threw the dead bolt. When he opened the door he was not surprised to see Mr. Tripp, his elderly neighbor standing in his night shirt glaring angrily at him through soil-smudged glasses.

  “I told you before and I am not going tell you again, young man. There are people trying to sleep in this building—” The old man stopped abruptly as his expression of anger turned to horror. He looked Wolf up and down. “Oh, dear God,” he cried, backing away. “What’s happened to you?”

  Wolf was sure that he’d gone to the door naked. He remembered coming home from his gig, undressing, falling into bed and dreaming a terrible dream of being a monster carrying a slain young woman. The dream was still vivid in his mind. Glancing down at his body he discovered that he was wearing clothes he had no memory of dressing in; sweatpants and a t-shirt. His pant legs, all the way up to his knees, were covered in filthy muck. And the front of his T-shirt was soaked in some sort of sticky wetness. He put his hand to it and it came away red.

  He backed up a step staring stupidly at his splayed fingers. Mr. Tripp stumbled back with such violent force that his legs became entangled and he fell sprawling onto the corridor floor. Instead of helping him, Wolf slammed the door, locked it and stood with his back against it, trembling, breathing in vast spasms.

  “I’m calling the cops on you,” Mr. Tripp cried from the other side of the door, his voice ragged with emotion. “You’re a weirdo. A nut job. I hope they throw you out onto the street! I hope they throw you back in the slammer!” Wolf heard his neighbor struggling to stand up and then shuffling down the hallway, his hysterical banter receding as he went.

  “What is happening to me?” Wolf asked the empty room. “Dear God, how can this be?”

  He slid to the floor, his trembling legs no longer able to support his numb body. “Please, God,” he said. “If you can hear me give me a sign that you know it isn’t me doing these things.” No answer was forthcoming, however. Wolf did not expect one. He’d been here before in this dark and terrible place and his prayers had never yet been answered. Nevertheless they stirred emotions in him that he did not understand and would probably have been best left undisturbed.

  Say it, Danny!

  Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye?

  That’s a very good boy.

  Wolf got up onto his knees, bowed his head and made the sign of the cross. On soiled knees beside the door on a dark and dreary October night, Danny Wolf prayed for some sort of deliverance. And as he was praying, an idea struck him. It was a perfectly logical idea, actually, and he wondered afterwards if perhaps it hadn’t been delivered by a divine power.

  There was an old hippy he’d met in the clubs who called himself Jack the Ripper. Despite the name Jack was a harmless old coot who conducted most of his illicit business right out in the open. It was the same hookup Wolf used for his amphetamines. Jack claimed he could get anything for anybody. If you needed a bag of weed or an eight ball of white lines or a prescription for Diazepam, or even some sort of lethal hardware, Jack was your man. So, that very next night at the bar, Wolf had a conversation with Jack the Ripper, handed him four
hundred dollars in cash and put in his order. The next night, right on schedule, Jack delivered the goods. After the gig they went out to Jack’s car. Jack reached under the seat and produced a shiny new Glock nine millimeter automatic with a filed-down serial number and two clips full of hollow point ammo. Wolf thanked Jack the Ripper, went home, tucked the loaded weapon safely between his mattress and box spring, cuffed himself to the bed post and slept soundly for the first time in what seemed like weeks.

  That night he didn’t dream exactly, but Wolf was aware of the dreams waiting to get in from just beyond some otherworldly threshold. The dreams, and the demons that occupied them seemed confused that Wolf had made such a choice. They weren’t sure if he was serious. Honestly, neither was Wolf, but he wasn’t about to tell them that. Oh, they’d figure it out eventually and come crawling back like the ruinous bastards that they were. But for now Wolf took comfort in the knowledge that the gun was the only decision he’d made in recent months that made any real sense. He’d been hoping for a savior, the kind with long legs, a pretty face and a brain. What he’d found instead were lost souls, women just as pathetic as he was, some more so. Most had the legs and the pretty faces, none had much in the way of brains, however, or they wouldn’t have been fucking around with the likes of him. No, Wolf’s savior, the real deal, now lay dormant between his mattress and box spring. And he took comfort in the fact that at a moment’s notice it had the power to rise up and deliver him from evil.

  PART TWO

  COPS

  Chapter 18

  An unseasonably cold wind whipped dust into skittering funnel clouds. Scraps of debris whirled as morning sun struggled to heat the earth.

  The young police officer pulled his coat collar up around his neck and stared down at the woman’s remains. Without warning his stomach betrayed him. He turned away and managed a few unsteady duck-walk steps before bending over, like an actor taking a bow, and spewing his breakfast on the ground at his feet.

  He did not want to look at her, but unwittingly his eyes kept going there. Her body was partially submerged in a pool of slimy water at the base of a trash mound. Her legs stuck up onto dry land, bloated, fish-belly white, like a sick parody of a blowup sex doll. He saw the markings on her body and remembered a verse from the Old Testament.

  “Ye shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks upon you: I am the LORD.” He even remembered which book the verse had come from: Leviticus.

  Once again his eyes trailed down her naked torso tracing the outline of the bloody symbol there. He closed his eyes, swallowing back bile.

  When he opened his eyes something swept across his vision. Adrenaline pumped into his heart nearly stopping it. His hand went automatically to his weapon. A gauzy form without shape or definition now sped toward him at a nearly blinding rate of speed. He drew his weapon and aimed. For a moment it looked as if the form, whatever it was, would run him over. His finger squeezed the trigger, but just before reaching him the illusion vanished. With a trembling hand the officer re-holstered his weapon unfired. He reached out and touched the place where he’d seen the form but felt nothing. The smell of ozone was strong in the chill morning air.

  A shimmering young woman with long, dark hair dressed in a white gown materialized near the body. She stood watching him with staring eyes, her hands held out before her. Her eyes were like cinders, burning holes into the officer’s brain.

  “Is this you?” he whispered, pointing at the body in the stagnant pool. The ghost did not reply, she simply dissolved before his eyes. For a moment he wondered if she’d been there at all. He closed his eyes and quickly reopened them. She did not reappear. The officer released his pent-up breath.

  “Holy crap,” he whispered. “I’ve just seen a ghost.” His heart was pounding in his chest like a trip hammer and he could feel blood pumping at his temples. His eyes darted up and down the landfill, over to the highway and back, to the line of old telegraph poles on the other side of the dirt road. Above the mountains of trash, seagulls swooped, their calls echoing like the remnants of tattered dreams. Chills that had nothing to do with the cold morning air ran the length of his spine, and despite the unseasonably cold temperatures his body beneath the uniform was soaked with sweat.

  A siren whelped. An unmarked Crown Vic and a black-and-white moved swiftly down Landfill Road, their tires spewing rooster-tails of dust up from the dry road surface. The officer pushed his hat to the back of his head, wiped his brow with the sleeve of his shirt and exhaled a sigh of relief.

  Both cars halted behind his. Columns of dust rose and whirled. Two men in plain clothes exited the Crown Victoria, two uniformed officers from the black and white.

  “Where is it, Myers?” asked a large, handsome man in a tan trench coat. His name was Jennings and he looked like an unmade bed. The trench coat was wrinkled, the tie unknotted and hanging askew, thin wisps of blond hair stood straight up, spiked by the insistent wind. His white scalp was visible beneath the thin hair.

  The young officer pointed at the murky pool.

  Jennings approached the corpse, staring down at it. “How’d you find it?”

  “I was doing my rounds when these two kids flagged me down. Said they were taking a shortcut to school.”

  “Did you question them?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well?”

  “They were just kids, sir. They didn’t know anything.”

  “You know they’ll talk, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, but I didn’t feel like I had the right to hold them.”

  “Get their names and addresses?”

  “Yes, sir. Right there on my notepad.”

  “Good work.”

  “It’s a woman, sir.”

  “I can see that.” Jennings thought the officer’s eyes looked haunted.

  “Someone carved a cross on her,” Myers said. “And she’s got tattoos.”

  “Yeah, I see that too,” Jennings replied. “You okay, Myers?”

  “Look at them,” Myers said. “They’re...filthy.”

  Jennings knew the officer was referring to the body art. Actually he was having trouble taking his own eyes off it. On the woman’s right front shoulder was a tattoo of a three-fanged skinless demon clinging to the back of a large, hair covered man. Or perhaps it was a monster. Jennings couldn’t really be sure. Some sort of snake continued down the arm to almost the wrist.

  A sort of Christ figure in white robes, his hands held out before him in entreaty, was tattooed on the corpse’s front thigh just below the hip bone. On her left hip was a tattoo of a man dressed as a nun who seemed to be playing with his own genitals. And there were more. Most were markings of an intensely blasphemous nature. If you happened to be religious, that is. Jennings sighed. The kids that did these sorts of things to themselves evidently weren’t. These days it was common to use blasphemous religious symbols as body art. They thought it was ‘radical’ or something. New meaning for an old word. What’ll they think when they’re seventy?

  He stared down at the dead young woman and knew that the same person had killed both victims. It could not be coincidence. They’d both been stabbed to death. And on both bodies, the killer had left his mark, a crudely carved cross. Jennings was suddenly reminded of another murder from half a decade ago.

  Chapter 19

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Myers said. He continued staring at the corpse, his eyes large and dulled by shock.

  “Dead people bother you, Myers?” The question came from the second plainclothesman, a man named Frank Cavanaugh. He was tall and lean with close-cropped salt and pepper hair, sunken, impassionate eyes and worry lines around his cruel mouth.

  “That does,” Myers said pointing at the corpse. “Those are Christian symbols.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  Myers stared at Cavanaugh and did not reply.

  “Myers is a Jew,” said one of the other officers.

  “You’re shitting me.” C
avanaugh said. He was looking at Myers like he was from another planet.

  “Does that make you think any less of me?” asked Myers.

  “No, Myers, I just didn’t know you were a Jew, that’s all, and I don’t think anything could make me think less of you.”

  “It never ceases to amaze me how insensitive you Christians are to other religions,” Myers said.

  “What, I’m supposed to be psychic?” Cavanaugh said.

  “And the shit you Christian assholes do in the name of your lord,” Myers added, his voice rising. “This is sick.”

  “You know something, Myers?” Cavanaugh said. “It wasn’t us Christian assholes that did this. It was some sick pervert.”

  Myers eyes looked haunted. “There’s something wrong here,” he said.

  “What do you mean by that?” Lieutenant Jennings asked, turning his full attention to the young officer.

  “I don’t know,” Myers replied. His haunted eyes were darting around, panic filled, his tongue licking nervously from his mouth. “I...can’t really explain it. It’s...I don’t know. It’s like there’s something...evil around her. Some sort of unfinished business or something.”

  “Unfinished business?” Cavanaugh said with a harsh laugh. “Christ. Now I’ve heard everything. She looks quite finished to me, Myers.”

  “No, you don’t understand. I saw something.”