by Matt Hlinak
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I suppose I should be flattered. How about another beer?”
Culann fetched another couple of beers, and again the dogs followed him. Then the dogs outside began a calamitous barking. Schuler peeked out the windowsill.
“It’s Williams,” she said. “Put these back on.”
She tossed the handcuffs to Culann, who dropped them. He bent down and latched the cuffs on his left wrist. He pressed his right wrist into the other end, which clicked into place just as the door swung open. Williams stood in the doorway, dead drunk, with a nearly-empty Jim Beam bottle in his left hand and his gun in his right.
“Let’s go, Mr. Riordan,” he said. “You’re coming with me.”
4
Culann marched down Pyrite’s only road with Williams’ gun pressed against his spine. Schuler followed behind, pleading for Williams to put the gun away. The dogs cheerfully cantered along beside as if they were all heading to the park instead of an execution.
Williams led them to the police boat, already laden with corpses. He shoved Culann towards it and motioned for him to climb aboard. Culann took a long step from the dock onto the boat and then stumbled forward onto McGillicuddy.
“If this is where we’re putting the dead bodies,” Williams said, “this is where you’re going.”
“Knock it off,” Schuler said. “This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not joking,” he replied. “If we die tonight, then this sicko gets off scot free. I can’t let that happen.”
“If we die tonight, then it doesn’t matter what happens to him.”
“Of course it matters. There is good and evil in this world. Our job is to protect the good and punish the evil. He must be punished.”
“Not like this,” Schuler said.
Culann kept his mouth shut, afraid that anything he’d say might antagonize Williams beyond the point of no return. He was going to have to let Schuler plead his case for him and hope that she knew her partner well enough to talk him out of this.
“This is the only way,” Williams said.
“Be reasonable,” Schuler said. “He’s charged with statutory rape of a sixteen-year-old. You don’t get the death penalty for that. He’s going to be stuck on this island by himself. That’s like a prison sentence. He will be punished.”
“Bullshit. Rapists don’t just get a prison sentence. You know what a prison sentence would be like for this pervert.”
“That may be true, but we don’t even know if he’s guilty. All we know is some prosecutor in Illinois thinks he did something wrong. There hasn’t been a trial. He’s entitled to a trial.”
“Fine by me,” Williams said. “We’ll have one right now.”
He stepped forward and aimed the gun at Culann’s head.
“Did you do what they said you did?” he asked.
“Please, put the gun down,” Schuler said.
“I asked you a question,” he shouted to Culann.
“This isn’t right,” Schuler said. “Stop it.”
“You have three seconds to answer the question. Did you fuck an underage girl?”
Culann thought carefully about how to answer. He considered lying, although he doubted it would save his life. He figured that since he was probably dead either way, he might as well keep his self-respect. He was far from an admirable man, but he had a certain sense of honor, honor that he’d come to Alaska to try to win back. He didn’t want to go to his grave groveling for his life.
“Yes,” Culann said.
The sound of a gunshot boomed across the island and bounced off the waves of the sea. Culann clenched all of the muscles in his body in the hopes that this would somehow cause the bullet to miss him. He went numb, dropping to his knees atop two corpses. Then he exhaled and searched for the bullet hole.
It took him a while to find it. He felt his head, patted down his chest, and ran his hands over his arms and legs. Finally, he looked up and saw Williams crumpled onto the pier with a bloodstain spreading across his chest. Schuler holstered her weapon and bent down to check her partner’s pulse.
“Thank you,” Culann said.
“Don’t say anything,” Schuler replied. She looked like she was fighting to keep from crying. She straightened up, rubbed her eyes and turned her back on Culann.
“Just let me die.”
5
Culann awoke amidst a pile of slumbering dogs in Frank’s bed. He was sweating, and his handcuffed wrists ached. He crawled over Alphonse to get off the bed and then went to the bathroom. When he finished, he realized that the plumbing in Frank’s shack was run by electric pumps, which were no longer functioning. If he lived much longer, he was going to have to get used to life without running water.
Since the sink didn’t work, Culann had to rely on the contents of Frank’s refrigerator to slake his thirst. All he could find were cans of beer that were barely below room temperature. He choked one down and then set off to see if Schuler had made it through the night. He walked out of Frank’s cabin, not bothering to shut the door behind him. The last time he’d seen her, she’d gone into Alistair’s tavern, so that’s where Culann looked first. The dogs shook themselves awake and lolled after him. The sun hung in its usual position in the middle of the sky, giving Culann no idea what time it was.
When he arrived at Alistair’s, Culann found Schuler hunched over the bar with her arms wrapped around a whiskey bottle. He couldn’t tell if she was dead drunk or dead. The dogs began to whimper, which Culann knew wasn’t a good sign. He placed his hand on her neck. It was cold.
Schuler had saved him, and Culann was grateful for it. He vowed to remember her for the rest of his life, however short it might be. But he’d seen enough dead bodies recently that he didn’t dwell too hard on her passing. He had his own survival to worry about.
First, he went behind the bar and found a few bottles of club soda. He guzzled one and half of another. After a long belch, he started looking for the key to Schuler’s handcuffs. He searched her utility belt, which was a bit difficult because she was slumped forward, but he eventually found a small key in a velcro pouch. He pulled the key out and then realized that unlocking the handcuffs was going to be more challenging than he’d imagined. The cuffs held his wrists tightly together, and the keyhole was on the underside of the cuffs. It took a considerable amount of painful contortion just to get the key into position. Once he had it in the hole, his fingers were stretched so far he couldn’t twist the key in the lock. Twice he dropped the key and had to start all over. By the time he finally coaxed the latch to spring open, the cuffs had scraped away patches of skin on both wrists.
He sat down at the bar next to Schuler’s corpse to rest for a few minutes. He finished the second bottle of club soda and then took a swig from Schuler’s whiskey bottle. He had to get back to the entirely unpleasant task of loading corpses onto the police boat before the bodies decayed or got eaten by the dogs. Culann started with Schuler. Figuring they might come in handy, he first stripped off her binoculars and utility belt and laid them atop the bar. Since she was slumped over in her seat, it was relatively easy for him to position his shoulders underneath her body and pick her up in a fireman’s carry. His legs wobbled as he lurched toward the door, but he managed to slide through and deposit her into the wheelbarrow. He pushed her down the pier and then came upon Williams’ blood-soaked body. Culann cursed and then grabbed Williams by the legs and dragged him to the police boat. The slats of the pier didn’t make for a very smooth surface, and Williams was a large man. When Culann finally reached the end of the pier, he dropped down amongst the corpses and yanked Williams’ legs until his body slid over the rail and into the boat. Culann stripped off Williams’ gun and belt and tossed them onto the dock. Them he pulled himself up onto the pier and resumed pushing the wheelbarrow towards the edge, where he dumped Schuler on top of Williams.
Culann was already exhausted from the effort
of disposing of two dead bodies all by himself. Plus, Schuler was a lot smaller than most of the men he’d need to grab. The prospect of repeating this task twenty-two more times discouraged him. He took another swig of whiskey and then grabbed little Marty off the far end of the bar. He figured the relative ease of hauling a child’s body might help him regain his confidence. It did, briefly, but then he struggled with Margaret, Carla and Genevieve, who’d all died close to the pier. Culann’s thighs burned, his arms felt numb, and he still had an island worth of dead fishermen to haul away.
The dogs didn’t help. They followed Culann wherever he went and encircled him as he walked. More than once he stumbled over the mutts while hefting a corpse. They also crawled over the dead bodies just when Culann started to pick one up. He’d shove one dog away, and then another would take its place. At one point he got so frustrated that he shouted, “Get the fuck out of the way,” which the dogs amazingly seemed to understand. The canine sea suddenly parted, opening a clear path back to the pier.
“Stay here,” he said, and just as miraculously, all forty-eight dogs remained where they were. They didn’t seem too happy about it, though. They stared at him, a sea of puppy-dog eyes, and they whined and shuffled their paws, but not one of the normally-unruly dogs followed him.
“Okay, you can come,” he said, and they bounded after him.
6
He hauled away two more fishermen and finished Schuler’s whiskey bottle before collapsing against the wall of Alistair’s tavern. He’d worked for what felt like two or three hours on an empty stomach, and now his body refused to move. After a few minutes, Culann crawled into Alistair’s kitchen and devoured half a loaf of white bread and several slices of American cheese. He washed it down with a couple of warm beers, which were hard to keep down. He realized he needed a way to keep his beer cold or he’d have a hard time making it by himself.
Taking a break from corpse-hauling to focus on his own needs, Culann devised a system of refrigeration that he was quite proud of. He tied one end of a short length of rope to the pier and the other end to a tapped keg. The keg had some air in it, so it floated up near the surface of the water. Culann had only to pull the keg over to him to draw a beer cooled to the fifty-degree temperature of the ocean. He sat on the edge of the pier and dangled his bare feet in the water while the keg cooled. He glanced to the side and realized he was just a few feet from where he’d chucked the orb. He imagined it resting on the silty bottom, beaming out those evil rays that didn’t harm him for reasons he still couldn’t fathom. The dogs, who were similarly mysteriously-impervious, piled around him on the dock or splashed around in the water just above the orb’s resting place.
Though he was worn out and a little sick from the warm beer and whiskey, Culann had seventeen more bodies to deal with. He stood up and noticed Williams’ equipment in the pier where Culann had left it. He figured it might come in handy, so he strapped the belt around his waist. He took stock of the inventory: pistol, flashlight (non-working), walkie-talkie (ditto), handcuffs, plastic gloves, a big Swiss army knife, pepper spray, and a billy club. He didn’t know how useful any of this stuff might prove, but the belt gave him a feeling of authority, even though there was no one here to exercise authority over. He decided to wear the belt as much as possible.
Suitably equipped, he pushed the wheelbarrow down the road to Worner’s cabin.
The dogs of course tagged along. While Culann labored to lug his friend’s corpse through the door, Alphonse snatched up Worner’s dead cat and ran outside with it. Two other dogs lurched forward and clamped their jaws on the cat. All three growled and shook their heads, tearing the cat to pieces within a few seconds. A few more dogs jumped in, and soon the cat was completely devoured. Culann realized the dogs hadn’t been fed in a couple of days. He’d need to do something about that if he didn’t want them going feral and attacking him.
He wrestled Worner into the wheelbarrow and then sat on the ground to catch his breath. He glanced out of the corner of his eye and saw four neat little rows of tall, green plants growing next to Worner’s shack. As he looked closer, he realized they were marijuana plants. He smiled at the idea of Worner toking away in his little cabin just beyond the reach of civilization. Although he hadn’t gotten high since college, Culann thought maybe he’d reward himself with some of Worner’s crop once he finished collecting the dead.
He loaded Worner onto the boat with the others and then headed over to Wal-Mart Jr. to see what it might have for the dogs. This was his first time in the store, which didn’t have much. It did have eggs and milk, though, both of which were already starting to rot. In another day or two it would be impossible to set foot in the store without gagging, so Culann loaded all of the perishables into the wheelbarrow and dumped them in the water down the shore, away from the pier and his floating keg.
Fortunately, the store was also well-stocked with non-perishable items, including several big bags of dog food. There was also a good amount of meat—steaks, ground beef, bacon, and fish—that would go bad soon, so Culann loaded it all onto the wheelbarrow and dumped it on the ground outside. The dogs swarmed in, tore through the packaging and gobbled it all up within a matter of minutes. Culann went back inside and continued his survey. He found a lot of canned goods, some packaged lunchmeats and beef jerky sticks, boxes of cereal, several loaves of white bread that wouldn’t stay good for very long, as well as a whole shelf lined with gallon jugs of water.
This last item made Culann realize that the island did not have a ready source of fresh water. Before disaster struck, he’d been able to wash his hands and flush the toilet at Frank’s place, so he figured there had to be a well, but he wasn’t sure how to find it or how to get at the water. Even if he did figure that out, he wasn’t sure the water would be potable. The dogs had probably been subsisting on rainwater left over from the storm, and he was going to need to get them something to drink soon. Four dozen dogs would go through the water in the store within a couple of days. If Culann didn’t figure out a way to access the well, he was going to have to kill the dogs.
It was becoming clear to Culann that simply surviving as the sole human being on an island in the Bering Sea was not going to be easy. There wasn’t enough food and water to support him and the dogs much longer. Even if the dogs were somehow out of the equation, he didn’t know how long he could live off canned peas and Spam. If he managed to hold out for the next couple of months, he would then have to contend with winter. The sun that didn’t set in summer wouldn’t rise for a two-month period in winter.
Nothing in Culann’s life had prepared him to survive in this climate.
These thoughts depressed him. He snatched a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from Alistair’s and headed over to the dock. Fog was beginning to creep across the water, obscuring Culann’s view of the shore. He hoped the fog would keep Schuler’s and Williams’s comrades from coming out to look for them, although he knew it was only a matter of time. He envisioned waves of death as people came out to investigate and then more followed to investigate the investigators. He also didn’t relish the prospect of being placed under arrest each time and having to finagle out of the handcuffs after his captors succumbed to the orb’s power.
Overcome with the hopelessness of the situation, Culann drank half the bottle and passed out on the dock.
7
Culann ate a breakfast of beef jerky and Tylenol, which he washed down with half a gallon of water. He then snatched a glass from Alistair’s and went to see how his keg refrigeration system worked. The fog had thickened considerably while he’d slept.
He had a difficult time locating the rope he’d tied to the keg, but when he did, he managed to pour himself a cool beer, which made him feel better. If he could keep his beer cold without power, he thought he just might be able to solve all of his other problems.
With renewed confidence, Culann resumed loading bodies onto the police boat.
He worked hard over the next few hours, stopping on
ly to eat lunch. It took all of his strength and several glasses of beer, but he finally loaded the last body onto the boat as a light rain began to fall.
If he was going to keep the dogs alive, he was going to need rain-catchers. He scoured the island for anything that could hold water. He found three large pots in Alistair’s, several buckets in some of the cabins, a couple of old wash basins, and then he hit the jackpot with a plastic wading pool that had belonged to little Marty. He set these all out in a row out front of Wal-Mart Jr. and hoped it would rain long enough to fill them.
Having taken care of the dogs, for the time being at least, Culann returned to the police boat, which was full nearly to overflowing with dead bodies. Since the island had been powered entirely by generators, he had no trouble locating a can of gasoline. He emptied it over the people he once knew, perhaps the last people he would ever know.
Even with the heavy fog, Culann didn’t want to risk attracting attention from the mainland, so he unmoored the boat and took hold of the bowline. He pulled the boat along the pier until he reached the shore and then he walked slowly along the edge of the water, dragging the boat along with him. The island sloped off pretty quickly, so the water was deep enough that Culann could lead the boat all the way around to the western edge of the island from shore. It was slow going, but much easier than loading all the bodies had been. After an hour, the boat was completely out of the line of sight for anyone who may have been gazing across the water from land. Culann lit a book of matches he’d taken from Alistair’s and tossed it in the boat. Flames spread the length of the boat, and Culann could almost immediately smell the flesh of his friends catch fire. It was like burnt hair, but a thousand times stronger. He took a long pole and shoved the boat away. The wind was coming from the south, so it pushed the boat along the edge of the island. Culann sat on the grass, surrounded by dogs who all stared with him as the blazing boat slipped into the fog and was gone.
