Apocalypse Island

by Hall, Mark Edward

  Byrne knew that these new killings could not be covered up by the government. Some fool had taken photos of one of the victims and posted them on the internet. Now things were starting to unravel, the photos had gone viral and people were asking questions. Byrne feared that it was only a matter of time before questions about the orphanage began to arise and the church’s deceits were uncovered.

  How many were still out there, he wondered. Did any of them remember him? If so, could they point fingers? Should he inform the feds of the young man who’d come into his church or should he just wait and see what happened?

  Now with the killing of these nuns Byrne feared that it would not be long before the feds reappeared and this time they might not be satisfied just to eliminate the survivors. This time they might decide to eliminate...everyone who knew. The thought struck him like a lance that perhaps they had already begun.

  Byrne was caught between his duty to the church, his conscience, and his fear of recrimination. If what he knew ever came to light he would certainly be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity. But so would they all. Then the thought struck him that members of the government rarely paid for such crimes even though they were often the worst offenders. These men had ways of hiding behind terms such as top secret and national security. He knew also that they were good at cover-ups, at eliminating those who might implicate them.

  Finding no solace in prayer, or relief from his bleak thoughts, Father Byrne stood and left the church, the door to the nave shutting behind him with a soft whisper.

  Chapter 52

  Outside the wind was blustery and cold for October. A cold rain had ceased earlier and the sky had cleared. Without a moon Byrne could clearly see the constellations and the rim of the Milky Way galaxy above him. The thought struck him what a cold, vast and unforgiving place the universe was. Difficult to imagine God caring much for man’s concerns.

  He’d come to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine thinking he could start over, reaffirm his vows and forget about the things that had happened on Apocalypse Island. He’d been wrong about everything. He would never be able to forget what he’d seen there, all the suffering and cruelty, what he’d turned his back to, what he’d conspired to keep secret all these years.

  After the madness and the fire, the confusion, and all the death and destruction, he had come here, and as high as he’d climbed, as far as his ambition had taken him, his life was a failure. Now his deceit would be his undoing. He was lost and forsaken, tumbling into a darkness without end.

  He’d wanted to blame Father O’Neal for all that had happened—O’Neal, after all, was the one who’d made the pact—but he knew that he could only blame himself for turning his head, for going along when everything was so wrong. Now O’Neal was dead, brutally murdered nearly a year ago, and Byrne was the one left to bear the burden of sins committed in that terrible place.

  You can never outrun yourself, Patrick, he thought as he made his way through the dark night toward the rectory.

  Something moved near the corner of the building. He stopped and stood perfectly still. There it was again, a shifting of light and shadow, solid one moment and fluid the next. Sudden terror rushed through his bowels, turning them to liquid.

  “Father Byrne, do you remember me?”

  That voice. There was something familiar about it. “Who are you?’ he asked. “What do you want?”

  “Do you remember the orphanage, father? Do you ever think of the children?”

  Byrne crossed himself and took a backward step. It was as if someone had been reading his thoughts. “I think about them all the time,” he said.

  “Good,” the voice replied. “I hope you’ve suffered knowing what you did.”

  “Dear God, are you one of the...”

  “Children?” the voice finished for him. “Maybe I am. But I’m not a child any more.”

  “How is it possible...that you’re...?”

  “Still alive?” the voice whispered. “After you abandoned us we were saved.”

  “I tried to protect you!”

  “That is a lie! If turning your head while they tortured us is your idea of protection then you never fully understood your vows as a priest.”

  “You were all special children,” Byrne said.

  “Don’t patronize me, father, not after you gave us up to those monsters. You abandoned us when we needed you most. And if you deny it again I’ll gut you like a pig.”

  “Why can’t I see you?” whispered the priest.

  “They did this to me,” said the voice. “They wanted soldiers who could do all sorts of miraculous things. They made us eat terrible things. Do you remember the sick children crying about bad medicine, father, begging and pleading not to give them any more bad medicine? Only later did I realize that they were feeding us radioactive poison. They shocked us with electricity. They put terrible thoughts in our heads. They taught us to push people with our minds and do terrible things to them. They tried to make us communicate with the blue light. Do you remember the blue light, father?”

  “Oh dear God, yes, I could never forget the blue light. For a time I thought it would be your salvation. But they never understood it, did they?”

  “No. And they still don’t. When the fire happened, from the carnage I was reborn.”

  “But how...?”

  “The blue light, father. It saved us.”

  “Oh dear God,” Byrne said, crossing himself. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

  “Too late, priest.”

  “How many?”

  “How many did the blue light save? Is that what you want to know? How many survived? Quite a few, actually. If you could call what we have survival.”

  “I know how you must feel, but—”

  “You don’t have a fucking clue how I feel, priest. We were just children. They tortured us, treated us worse than lab rats, and you went along. And in the end you ran like a coward. Then you conspired to cover it up. This is about you and this evil institution you call a church.”

  “It wasn’t the church,” Byrne said with incredulity. “You can’t blame the church for what happened. Men! Evil men did this. Not the church. We took their money in order to save the children. You have to understand. They promised it would be all right, that only a few of you would be used and no harm would come to the rest.”

  “You offered up the few for the greater good, is that it?”

  “You were all so pathetic.”

  “So we weren’t worth saving?”

  “Sometimes sacrifices need to be made. But I told you, it wasn’t my decision.”

  “What about Danny? Was Danny worth saving?”

  “You all looked up to him. He was the—”

  “Beautiful one?” the voice finished for him and Byrne heard adulation in it. “Yes, he was beautiful and he was brave, the one everybody wanted to be. We all loved him. I still do. In the end he helped save us. The blue light told him how and he obeyed. Now he doesn’t remember. So sad. But I shall never forget what he did.”

  “Is he...involved in these killings?”

  The voice laughed. It was a high, hideous sound that sent terror rushing into Byrne’s heart.

  “Well, is he?” Byrne said, backing away a careful step.

  “Oh, that is so precious, priest. Now why would Danny be killing demons?”

  “Demons?” The priest said. “You’re telling me those murdered women are demons?”

  “Oh yes, father, you bet your ass they’re demons, and Danny needs to be protected from them.”

  “Oh, dear Jesus, you’re murdering people in his name?”

  “They’re not people! They’re demons I tell you! They wish to destroy him, just like they wish to destroy us all.”

  “You’re insane!” Byrne said. “All those things they did to you drove you mad!”

  “Could be,” said the voice. “But it doesn’t matter now.”

  The priest backed up another careful step, squinting to identi
fy the source of the voice. All he saw were shifting shadows. “Please,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

  The shadows solidified, moving toward him at speed and that’s when Byrne saw his antagonist for the first time. He could not believe his eyes.

  “I know who you are,” he said. “I’ve seen you. Oh, dear God! But how...? This can’t be happening... This isn’t right.”

  The killer laughed again, a high, hysterical sound, chilling in its ferocity. “Oh, it’s right, Father Byrne. It’s right, and it’s good.”

  Byrne’s mind told him to escape, but before the thought could translate into action the blade was in his throat buried to the hilt. He went to his knees, his clutching hands feeling the blade and the warm wetness there.

  His murderer stared with a cool and intelligent sort of detachment, the very same intelligence Byrne had seen in those very same eyes dozens of times. But he would never see those eyes again. He would never see anything again. He was on his way to Hell. Byrne coughed, choked, unable to breathe. Blood poured into his lungs, drowning him. He fell forward onto his face, his dead body twitching with spasms.

  Chapter 53

  When Wolf returned to his apartment at 1:45 am, he found a note on his door from Mr. Tripp telling him that the tenants had all gotten together and signed a petition for his eviction. The superintendent was reviewing it and would come to a decision tomorrow.

  Wonderful, he thought, balling the note up and throwing it at the wastebasket. Just fucking wonderful.

  He sat in his chair and drank whiskey until he was stupid drunk. Then he cuffed himself to the bedpost and laid awake tossing and tumbling, writhing and sweating, feeling like a man without a soul. Finally, sometime near dawn he fell into a troubled sleep.

  In his dream he carried a dead woman across a long field pitted with sand traps and striated with deep ruts. It was a suburban tract, littered with the remnants of some long-forgotten ambition.

  A line of construction vehicles, stripped naked by vandals and looking defeated and forlorn glared at him like skulls from an improbable iron-world graveyard. Piles of steel girders, red with rust, lay scattered in and around the abandoned site. In the distance an interstate roared, and across from it, a mile or so to the west, the sodium wash of shopping mall security lights shimmered.

  Above him stars glimmered like diamond chips against the black curtain of night.

  An old brick three-story building stood derelict against dark woods at the far end of the abandoned field.

  He knew this place. He’d been here before.

  Feeling a terrible aching in his soul, he walked on, staring straight ahead. Though he carried a dead woman, he could not bring himself to look her in the face. He knew that he would die if he did.

  He arrived at an opening in the building where there had once been a door. Now it was a maw; a wound in the flank of some dead and decaying monster. He stopped at the opening, staring at the darkness within. Rubble from the interior spilled through the doorway blocking a portion of it. He entered the building, ducking down and stepping over mounds of broken brick and fallen roof timbers. The woman’s dead weight was not a burden, for he was big and powerful, and she was so small, so defenseless.

  He made his way down a steep set of stairs into a basement.

  The light was dimmer down here, but he had no trouble seeing in the dark. He did not question why this was so. He stopped in the center of the empty space, squatted, and while holding the unconscious woman in one arm brushed the dust off a small patch of wood with his free hand. A brass ring was revealed. He grasped the ring and lifted a trap door up out of the floor. Dust rose into the dead air like microscopic insects. Tiny bits of sand cascaded into the opening with a sound like gently falling rain.

  An enormous wave of dread seized him. It was almost too much to bear, knowing in his heart that this dream was more than a dream. That it was all wrong. That what he was seeing—what he was living—was somehow real and so terrible.

  He stepped onto a crudely-made ladder and climbed down into a room below the basement, holding the woman carefully, so afraid he might break her.

  He was standing in a crude room with rough-hewn wooden walls and an earthen floor. The ceiling was constructed of old boards and beams, held up by metal jack posts. An old iron-frame bed sat against one wall, and beside it, several wooden trunks were stacked, one on top of another. An old chest of drawers with scraps of clothing sticking out of drawers askew leaned against the opposite wall. A closer inspection revealed most of the garments to be women’s lingerie, panties, bras, nylons. A crude two burner propane stove sat on a table constructed of concrete cinder blocks, and an array of soiled pots and pans lay scattered in and around the ramshackle shelter.

  He was hit with another nearly overwhelming wave of dread. This was so wrong. He shouldn’t be here. He needed to get away. He wanted to wake up. But worse, he wanted to die because there was nothing right about this dream. But it was no use. He was too far into it, and he knew he could not get out of it until he finished his business here.

  There were several columns of books stacked against one of the walls. He tilted his head to read the bindings before remembering that he was an elemental creature without reading skills. He recognized the big book atop the stack by the large emblazoned cross on its cover. He’d seen it before. He’d sat for hours listening as its passages had been read to him. It was a Holy Bible, its edges missing, burnt away, blackened by fire. The realization that he was not just one person struck him; he was two separate souls that had somehow intersected. But how was this possible?

  The shelter smelled sour, the odor of stale urine and vomit. There was a large dark stain on the bed’s mattress. Dozens of stunningly conceived drawings—some of a blasphemous religious nature—were pinned to the wooden walls with rusty nails. One particularly large example appeared to be some sort of cruciform painted in red. There was a Christ figure, his hands held before him in supplication, a three-fanged skinless demon on the back of a woman, a transvestite nun severing his own genitals, melting skulls, wraiths with ruby eyes. The place was a literal house of horrors. The images sickened him, made him want to vomit. He’d seen some of them before, scribed on the bodies of dead as well as living human beings.

  He’d nearly forgotten about the young woman in his arms. He moved closer to the bed and laid her gently down upon it, careful to avoid looking her directly in the face. He did not want to see her. If he could not see her then maybe she wouldn’t be real.

  This all reminded him of a time and place long ago, a place of fear and death and monsters, of bad medicine and transformations and fire. He saw it all in his dreams, along with an all-encompassing blue light that was strangely comforting, reminding him that it wasn’t over, that there was still much to be done.

  Cross my heart and hope to die.

  Chapter 54

  Laura was up, dressed and out of her apartment by four-thirty. She’d gotten only three hours of sleep, but that was okay. As the saying went, “she’d sleep when she was dead.”

  Yesterday she’d parked her car in the lot behind the apartment building. That’s where she went now, in a roundabout way, careful that she wasn’t being watched. She’d dressed all in black—black jeans, black shirt, black overcoat—in order to lessen the chances of being spotted. It was still dark as she made her way toward the lot. Still, she supposed someone could be watching from behind an unlighted window, or from the corner of a building. She was pretty sure that Jennings didn’t trust her and she knew it was likely that he had an officer on her. She wondered what his game was. Rick was a nice guy and a great cop, but contrary to his outward demeanor, which was ruffled and unorganized, he was a cool and calculating character who did everything for a reason. And he wasn’t always honest about his motives.

  Well, she was just as good as he was, and she would prove it by being one step ahead of him in this investigation. He’d tried to steer her away from Apocalypse Island and she thought
she knew why. For reasons she still didn’t quite understand, Jennings couldn’t touch Apocalypse Island. But Laura could. She was anonymous. No one knew about her, so no one cared what she did. Yes, Rick was a sly bastard. He’d set this up, and she had taken the bait, hook, line and sinker.

  She got behind the wheel of her Toyota and pulled out of the lot onto Washington Street, looking both ways to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Traffic was sparse and she didn’t see anything that would set her alarm bells off.

  Out on the interstate Laura drove toward South Portland, but four miles down she backtracked, reentering Portland from across Memorial Bridge. By the time she hit Commercial Street she was certain she wasn’t being followed. She pulled into the ferry terminal parking lot and stowed her car toward the back.

  Last night on the internet she’d learned that Apocalypse Island was approximately six miles long and two miles wide. Maine history of the island had pretty much echoed what Rick had told her about it. The early history wasn’t pretty; shipwrecks, (a lighthouse had been constructed in the late nineteenth century to keep ships off the rocks) famine, cannibalism, inbreeding. Terrible stuff. It was all an embarrassment to the state so they’d buried it. The Catholic orphanage added some credibility to the island’s image, but when the orphanage burned in the early 1980s leaving no known surviving children it had caused a scandal that had rocked the state, finally forcing them to take action and legitimize the island. Its gentrification had been a slow process, however, but now, with its new, more respectable residents and its subsequent cleanup, it was finally garnering a certain measure of respect from surrounding communities.

  No known survivors.

  Laura thought that was wrong and she aimed to prove it.