FULL MOON ISLAND

by Terry Yates

  Kyler pulled back the flap of skin, which was so large it reminded him of those old pajamas with the large trapdoor in the back. It was huge. When he pulled the flap down, he saw nothing but blood red skin covering muscle and rib cage.

  “You ought to just let him die.”

  Kyler turned to see Opal Munn glaring at the dog. She was scarier looking now than she had been before he saw her running ninety to nothing with her grandson draped over her shoulder. He looked at Wilbur who was sitting up next to her, but saying nothing. Kyler couldn’t tell if he was just a wimpy kid, or someone who had been very repressed as a child.

  “Now why would I want to do that, Opal?” he asked, staring into her face. She looked up for a moment and gazed back into the doctor’s eyes, her own seeming darker and larger than ever.

  “They’re vermin!” she hissed, now looking back at Joe. “Filthy, disgusting vermin!”

  “He’s hurt…” Lauren told the old woman as she carefully slid off the table. She held her side as she slowly made her way over to the doctor and Joe.

  “Kill him! Kill him, I say!”

  Kyler wanted to laugh. She sounded just like one of those old movie pirates that he would always see on TBS every Saturday afternoon when he was a kid.

  “He must scare you an awful lot to say bad things like that,” Lauren said, looking her in the face as she passed.

  God damn, she was one ballsy little thing, Kyler thought as she approached the table and put her hand on Joe’s head. He saw Opal looking at the two of them as if they were Hansel and Gretel being fattened up for the kiln. With both Kyler and Lauren staring her down, the old woman hissed one final time, then abruptly turned her back on them.

  Kyler looked down at Lauren and then back at the wound. “This is going to be tricky, Sweetie,” he started. “He needs a lot of stitches, but we have no way of putting them into him without anesthesia and I left my bag with all of the syringes in it back at the base.

  Lauren slowly walked over to the table where he was keeping all of the medical supplies that they had found, picked up a small, clear liquid vial and walked back.

  “Liquid morphine,” she said.

  “Again, Lauren, I don’t have any needles to inject him with.”

  “Can he take it orally?”

  “Well…eh…probably, but I don’t think that you’re going to be able to stick all of that down his throat. Dogs have a huge gag reflex.”

  Lauren looked down at the vial, then back up at him, her gorgeous green eyes penetrating him. She turned around and walked away from Kyler. He figured that she’d seen the light and had given up, but instead of walking back to her bed, she walked over to the table that had all of the laboratory equipment and picked up a small petri dish. She turned it over in her hands, looking at its suitability and then began to walk over to a marble white sink, which sat in the far corner of the room. She reached out and turned on one of the faucets, let the water run for a moment, and then put her hand in the water to see if it was cold or hot. She then took the petri dish, filled it with water, and began to slowly make her way back over to Kyler, being cautious not to spill any of its contents.

  “Can you put the sedative in the water?” She asked innocently.

  Kyler hadn’t even thought of this…as a matter of fact, no one had thought of this until an eleven-year old girl presented them with a possible solution.

  “I’m not sure it’ll work,” he told her, breaking open one of the vials, but we’ll try it.

  He poured a little of the liquid into the water, not wanting the dog to overdose. Boy, that would be great if he killed the dog before he ever even operated on it.

  “There,” he told her. Let’s try that.”

  She smiled up at him trustingly like she usually did, before placing the petri dish in front of Joe, who immediately began to lap up the water. The dish was small, so he only got about four good laps before it was empty. She patted his head, which of course, the dog loved. For a moment, Joe looked away from her and up toward the ceiling. Lauren looked up to find Potts standing over her, another petri dish full of water in his hand, which he placed in front of the dog.

  “There’s nothing like a good hound, is there, Missy?” he asked, the corners of his mouth almost forming a smile. She craned her neck up at him and smiled. Uh oh, Kyler thought to himself. If Potts wasn’t careful, he was going to fall under her spell, too. Lauren shook her head in the negative, and placed the second petri dish in front of Joe, who lapped that one up in three good laps of the tongue.

  “Dr. O’Hearley…Miss…eh…Zora…” Kyler stuttered, “would you two ladies find some drinking glasses, fill them with water, and bring them to me, please?”

  Ariella and Zora both nodded enthusiastically, realizing what the doctor was up to. He was going to give all of his patients’ pain medications by having them drink it. It probably wouldn’t work, but a few drops per patient should be okay. If anything, it might work as a placebo. They might just think that the pain was going away. He would wait and see how it affected the dog first. It would take a few minutes to find out, but if Joe didn’t OD, then the rest of them probably wouldn’t either. What he was doing was against every medical ethics code. He was experimenting on live human subjects, and that was always dangerous, but there was nothing else he could do. Sure, maybe Michael Blum and Lauren O’Hearley might be able to suffer through the pain, but he didn’t know how it would work for Samantha Gould or anyone else that might get hurt in the next day…or two…or three. They didn’t know how long they would be there. Potts had been amazed that the place was abandoned. This place was so classified that nothing short of Armageddon could clear it out, much less back-to-back hurricanes. Of course, they hadn’t been to any of the floors below where they were. For all they knew, there could be hundreds of people watching them at that very moment. One would hope that if anyone was here, they would’ve tried to help them by now, classified or not.

  Kyler had Zora fetch a stethoscope, which he’d found in a cabinet and everything else that he would need. He kept a watchful eye on Joe, waiting to see if he would nod off, but Joe had either a strong constitution or the liquid morphine wasn’t going to work as an anesthesia. God, where was a good dope head when you needed one? They would know. A good downer head could tell you exactly how many drops it would take to make a person sleepy, to put them out, and to OD them. Of course after telling you, he would probably OD himself.

  Kyler waited twenty minutes. During that time, Potts and Sam had decided to go search the area for any sort of communication devices, or computers that could access the internet, or guns, or food, or anything that might be useful to them.

  The computers on the desks were completely blank and there was no cellular phone access. That made sense when you thought about it. No one in such a top secret place, would take a chance on someone e-mailing information to someone outside the building, or taking a picture of said information with their cellular phone.

  Potts and Sam also wanted to check on what was going on outside, both with the werewolf AND the hurricane. The lobby security cameras were okay for the most part, but it didn’t give them more than a couple of hundred yards parameter. They wanted something that would show them the whole island, and if such a thing existed, it would be in this building somewhere.

  FranAnne and Hawkins had returned from the laundry, their uniforms nice and dry. Kyler and probably everyone there wondered how they pulled that one off. You seldom saw a lesbian and a black man standing naked in a laundry room with their clothes in a dryer…but they both seemed happy, almost rejuvenated because they were both dry and their fatigues were still toasty and warm.

  Finally, Joe began to close his eyes and his panting became less labored. Two minutes later, his eyes were completely closed, and his tongue stuck out of the side of his mouth and lay on the table. Ariella O’Hearley was now holding the stethoscope. She would check his vitals while he did the operation, just as he, Ariella, and Nurse Walling had done wi
th Lauren’s operation. He thought of Nurse Walling again and it almost made his insides cramp. Shake it off, Kyler, shake it off. You can grieve or reflect or whatever it is you want to do later. Right now, it’s time to operate. He shook his shoulders and head like a boxer would, then took one last look at the dog, before picking up the bottle of alcohol and a large cotton ball. This would be the acid test to see if the dog was anesthetized. If he didn’t respond to the alcohol, they were all right, but if the dog sat up and bit his face off with those powerful jaws of his, he was probably feeling it a tad. Well…he thought…this is it. He soaked the cotton ball with alcohol and touched it to the dog’s open wound. Joe flinched a little, causing both Joe and Ariella to jump backwards, but that was all. When he touched the cotton ball to the wound a second time, the dog didn’t move. He dabbed it a third and then a fourth time and still nothing. The dog was out. Kyler nodded to Ariella who put the stethoscope in her ears and placed it just underneath Joe’s chest. She listened for a moment, and then straightened back up. She nodded her head to Kyler telling him that everything was normal.

  “So far. So good,” he said as he continued to clean the wound. He looked down at Lauren who had decided to stay and stroke Joe’s head while he underwent the procedure. She looked up at both her mother and Kyler and smiled.

  “Lucky dog,” Kyler told the sleeping canine.

  CHAPTER 35

  Potts and Sam looked around the large room, for what, they weren’t sure, but they needed to find out what was going on outside…or at least find some means of communication.

  “What’s this room for, I wonder?” Potts asked aloud, more to himself than to Sam.

  “It’s too empty,” Sam answered, looking in a closet. “If there was anything in here, they took it with them when they left.”

  “I still can’t figure out why no one’s around here. There’s no security…nothing! This place is way too secretive to leave it wide open like this. All it took was a cardkey to get in. Normally, O’Hearley would’ve probably been met by half a dozen AK-47’s in his face if he’d just sauntered in, in the middle of the night, with a group of unauthorized civilians with him.”

  Potts heard a noise from the closet and turned around to find Sam no longer in sight.

  “Fong!” he said loudly. “Where are you?”

  “Did you say AK-47’s, Colonel?” asked Sam’s voice from inside the closet.

  Potts walked to the closet and stuck his head inside. He looked to the left. Nothing but a wall, but when he looked to his right, he saw that there was a false door standing wide open, Fong nowhere to be seen.

  “Where are you?” Potts asked, knowing full well that Fong was wherever the door went.

  “In here,” Sam answered anyway.

  Potts walked to the end of the empty closet and stuck his head through the false door where he saw Sam Fong standing with his back turned in front of a wall covered with assault rifles…AK-47’s to be precise.

  “Holy Mother of shit!” Potts exclaimed, moving into the room. When he cleared the hidden door, and was completely in the small room, he saw that each wall was covered with weapons of all types. Rifles, pistols, grenades AND grenade launchers, and plastic explosives of every type. There were even a couple of knives on one of the walls. Sam turned and looked at him.

  “You said AK-47s and we have AK-47s,” he told the colonel, smiling. “Do you think you could say “cheese burger and malt” for me next?”

  “It looks like they forgot something,” Potts said, not even hearing the cheeseburger remark.

  “I’ll say. At least if that thing gets in, we’ll be prepared.”

  “I don’t know, friend. I saw that monster take a gross of bullets right into its body, and still get away from us.”

  “Yeah,” Sam started, picking up a grenade, “but you never tried blowing him apart.”

  Potts mulled this over for a moment. He had already jumped off the high dive when he had decided to go farther than his classification allowed him, emergency or no emergency. The powers that be didn’t care one wit about civilians…or even soldiers for that matter, when it came to keeping something classified.

  “Go and fetch Hawkins and Cohen for me,” he told Sam, “while I start stacking these things.”

  Sam was a little taken aback at being ordered to do something. He didn’t work for this schmuck.

  “And tell them to bring something to carry all of this stuff in,” Potts told him as he began to take the weapons off the wall.

  “Yes, Sir!” Sam replied, sarcastically, before giving a nazi salute behind the colonel’s back before disappearing from the room.

  Potts took an Uzi off of the wall and held it in his arms as if he were about to use it. These fuckers were serious, Potts thought to himself. What would they need Uzi’s for? He checked the clip and saw that the small machine gun was loaded. There must some kind of important shit going on here to require a roomful of loaded weapons…and why wouldn’t he have been told? He was after all, the head of the base, which he wouldn’t have been if he didn’t shit red, white, and blue, when ordered to do so. God damn. Why was this island so important to the government? He paused and wondered if he’d be court-martialed for his insolence?

  “Well…screw ‘em,” he said aloud as he pitched a grenade up and down in his palm.

  CHAPTER 36

  Kyler put the last stitch in the dog. He didn’t sew him completely up, just a stitch here and there. He needed to save some for Samantha and for Lauren and for Joe’s eye. For right now, he would sew the flap up loosely, bandage it, then go back later and finish the job. He hoped that maybe the dog’s skin would begin to heal itself. Maybe the skin fibers would begin to grow back together much like a cut does when it begins to heal itself. Joe would be trussed up pretty well with the bandages. For the second time in twenty- four hours, Kyler felt proud of his medical skills…and for the fact that an eleven-year-old girl figured out to anesthetize someone without the use of a needle or ether.

  “There,” he said, putting the last stitch into their new savior. “All done.” He looked down at Lauren O’Hearley who had raised an eyebrow at him. “For now,” he added.

  “How about over here now, Doc?” he heard Gringo say sarcastically. “Do you think that you could help with the real people now?”

  Kyler stared across the room at Gringo who was glaring at him. He gave the dog’s head one last scratch, before making his way over to Samantha’s table. Sylvia had fallen asleep in a chair beside her, still holding her hand. Her head was on her chest and she was snoring lightly. Samantha’s head was still moving from side to side, although she wasn’t moaning anymore.

  “Can’t you do something for the pain?” Gringo asked, looking down at his wife.

  “I can’t do anything until I see how the dog reacts to the morphine, which my guess, would probably be another hour or so. If he comes out of it okay, then it should probably be all right to do the same for your wife and the others, but until then, I’ve done all that I can do.” Kyler put a hand on Gringo’s shoulder. “Look, why don’t you take Sylvia and a couple of the others and go throw your clothes in the dryers. I don’t want to be treating staff infections or mold, or any of the other bacterial maladies that come with wearing wet clothes.” He turned to the others. “I think you all need to get down to the laundry and dry out. You’ll feel better…just look at Pvt. Fulton…doesn’t she look all nice and refreshed? Come on…you can go in pairs, let your clothes dry for thirty minutes or so, and come back, and then we’ll send the next group.”

  “Good idea,” Zora replied, smiling. “My shoes are still soggy. Come on, Lauren…Ariella, let’s go get dry!”

  “Brilliant assessment!” Lauren squealed, looking up at her mother.

  “Genius hypothesis!” Ariella answered, smiling down at her daughter.

  “Really…good…eh…” Kyler tried to chime in, but got stuck without a good phrase. Even a doctor could feel like an idiot in the right situation.

>   “All right then. Let’s go, Ladies,” FranAnne said, also smiling. “There’s nothing like a nice, warm pair of skivvies to make a person feel good.”

  “Just be careful,” Kyler threw in. “This place is big, and we have no way of communicating with each other, so just be…eh…” He looked at Zora, who was smiling at him. “Eh…careful…” he trailed off. God, he wished he were going with her. He didn’t think he would mind standing in a room naked with Zora LeMarque…or doing anything else naked with Zora LeMarque for that matter. He could feel that idiot grin returning to his face and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  As the four ladies made their way to the door, Kyler spoke up again. “Don’t be long, Lauren,” he told her in his best doctor’s voice, “I need to have another look at those stitches, so don’t window shop, okay? And don’t run. Whether you know it or not, you’re still weak and need your rest.”

  Lauren looked at him and smiled before giving him a wave, and exiting the room with the others. Once again, he turned to Gringo. “When they get back, you and Sylvia should go.”

  Gringo dropped his head, before nodding slowly. “Doc?” he asked.

  “What is it?”

  “I really didn’t mean to put Samantha’s life in danger,” he told him. “If I’da known…you know…that that thing would’ve…well, I wouldn’t have done it.”

  An awkward silence fell across the room. Although only Zack Olsen, Michael Blum, Shelly Dixon, and the Munn’s were awake to hear him, it seemed like a thousand eyes were watching the two of them.

  “I know that,” Kyler answered. “I think we all know that.” Kyler didn’t look at the others, because he was pretty sure that they weren’t having any of it, except maybe Opal, who seemed to have gone completely round the bend, and Wilbur whose train was not traveling far behind his grandmother’s.