Red Sand (8 page)

His casual delivery of this news delayed any reaction. Reality took on a dizziness of incomprehension. Several seconds of stunned silence ensued. Emily broke it when she retched into a patch of zucchinis. The other responses were more verbal.

“What the f-!?”

“Oh my god!”

“Who did this to him!?”

Ados’ eyebrow rose a quarter inch in surprise. “Your friend Max died this afternoon. We do not waste nutrients on the island. I believe I explained this quite clearly.”

Only Carter remained calm. He moved forward to inspect the remains.

Mason stood with his hand on his forehead. “That is just… wrong.”

Ados looked offended. “It is essential. Dust to dust, as they say. The earth nourishes our bodies. We must give back. You will remember your friend every time you eat.”

“I don’t think I’m ever eating again,” said Emily, still bent over.

“Then you will sooner join him,” said Ados unsympathetically.

They stood rooted in place, unsure how to respond.

“I see that this disturbs you,” Ados remarked. “We are nearly done with our work. I believe you can retire for the day. You will not be reassigned here tomorrow, as we work on rotation. By the time you return, you will understand.”

The compost heap now lay between them and the only door out. As much as they wanted to leave, they didn’t want to leave that way. Mason put his arm around Emily to shield her view. Carter mimicked this for Lauren. She was glad of it. Though she didn’t see the remains, she couldn’t block the pungent, warm smell of meat. Even worse, she couldn’t control the growl in her stomach as it recognized the smell of food.

Back at Departure Camp, the sun set swiftly. Even after sunset, the flies kept biting. Everyone huddled around the fire pit where the noxious smoke deterred some percentage of insects. A chill breeze set in from the North. Their huts were designed to keep out the sun, not the wind. The warmest place to sleep would be near one another.

Mason related the incident with Max to the others.

Lauren sat beside Carter next to the fire. Despite the horror, the cold, and the stress, or perhaps because of it, her thoughts were carnal in nature. She liked having Carter next to her. She wanted to feel his warmth tonight. She wanted him to remind her she was still alive.

“He should have received a burial.” Mason stalked around the edge of the fire pit, unable to sit down. “Or last rights, or something. Was he Catholic?”

“I think he was Jewish,” Lauren pitched in, though she wasn’t sure. “I don’t know what they do.”

“A rock at the gravesite,” Carter added. “I’ve heard.”

“That’s good enough for me.” Mason bent down to pick up one of the omnipresent lumps of black volcanic rock lying in the camp. “For Max,” he said, placing it ceremoniously near the fire.

Each of them found a rock and placed it on the pile. “For Max,” they said.

Lauren found it more pagan than religious, but it felt good to do something, anything. Somewhere in the darkness, Max’s body lay cut up and decaying in a garbage heap. If she died here… it was too horrible to contemplate. She had to know that someone would remember; that there would be something left behind. Even a heap of stones beat nothing at all.

This pile of stones wasn’t for Max, it was for themselves.

His job done, Mason sat down at the fire next to the woman named Amy. It was the same woman he’d offered a napkin to the night before. She seemed to gravitate toward him whenever they assembled.

“I don’t like it here,” Emily said, hugging her knees.

“I agree.” Lauren couldn’t stand it. She had to get off this island.  

They fell into a mutual silence, almost a prayer. Lauren’s hand sought Carter’s. When she put her hand in his, he didn’t pull away, though his eyes did not waver from the fire.

“Max’s death isn’t the only thing odd on this island,” Carter said, breaking the silence. “Did you see how Paul didn’t go past the gate? What’s up with that?”

“I didn’t notice,” Lauren said when no one else pitched in.

“In fact, I don’t think I ever saw Paul inside the Wall. Did any of you?”

No one nodded their head or seemed to understand where he was going with the discussion.

Carter sat silent for a moment, then said, “Paul is the only one who doesn’t have white hair.”

The discussion moved on. Mason asked Amy what her task had been that day.

“We were assigned to fishing. We caught fish in the bay and loaded them into baskets filled with salt. They preserve them that way.”

“That doesn’t sound too bad.”

“It was bad. The waves push you up against sharp rocks. The fish we caught had spines. Just before we waded in to get the nets, they told us about all the dangerous fish in the water – blowfish, jellyfish, sharks, anemones, and some kind of venomous snail. Then they sent us in anyway.”

“Nice.”

Someone else joined in. “That sounds better than our task. We were stuck in the salt pools. The sun fried us all day. The water acts as a mirror, so now I’m sunburned even under my chin.” He tried to show them, but it was indiscernible in the firelight. “The sun reflected right up my shorts to burn places the sun’s never seen.” Some people laughed. “You don’t believe me? Look!” He stood up.

Everyone held up their hands. “No, no, that’s all right.”

“Anyway, I’m so glad we’re rotating tomorrow.”

“Don’t be. We were working with manure all day,” Mason said.

“And worse,” Emily added. Silence fell again.

Lauren grew weary of the discussion. She wanted to be alone with Carter. She whispered in his ear, “Let’s go somewhere private.”

She pulled his hand and stole out into the shadows.

The moon came out in full, almost as bright as day. Before them, the shore glowed in a surreal blue light. In the distance, waves crashed over the reef in phosphorescent splendor. Behind each dune lay a darkness as deep as the universe. They walked the path toward the beach in silence, hand in hand. She stole meaningful glances at him, smiling. He smiled back.

“I don’t know about you,” she said. “but I need a bath. I feel wretched.”

“There’s no fresh water on the island.”

She cozied up to him. “I was thinking of going for a swim in the surf.” As they reached the beach, she started to unbutton her shirt. “How do you feel about skinny dipping?”

“With sharks?” he asked, but his words were lost on the wind.

Lauren felt crazy, torn between her desire for Carter and her disgust at the day. The wind brought goose bumps to her naked skin. She felt clothed in death. The desire to scrub that off overwhelmed her fear of sharks.

The waves grew rough, but the water was warmer than the air. She dove beneath the froth of the next big curler. Darkness closed over her.

When she came up, she looked back at the beach. Carter stood there, fully clothed. She shouted to him, “You wouldn’t leave a naked girl alone, would you?” He didn’t stir. He looked as if he were guarding her clothes. He had collected whatever she had thrown off and folded them into a neat pile.

She rubbed sand across her arms and legs to scour them clean. Handfuls of sand scraped her body. The image of Max in a compost heap wouldn’t leave her. She felt as if she were covered in blood. She couldn’t scrape it off. Unaware how long she had been scrubbing, she finally noticed tiny droplets of real blood oozing from long troughs in her skin.

Now
she worried about sharks. She had to get out of the water.

She stumbled up the beach toward Carter. The wind chilled her wet skin. Miles of sand and sea spread out forever. She had never felt so tiny, alone, and vulnerable. Before she even left the surf, she collapsed to her knees, crying.

I’m stronger than this
, she thought, but uncontrollable sadness gripped her. She knew she would never leave this island alive.

She heard Carter’s footsteps on the wet sand as he approached. He did not attempt to console her. “I’m so sorry,” she said, trying to regain her composure. “I’m so sorry. I’m stronger than this. I am.”

“I know,” he said.

Her clothes landed in front of her. They reeked. She wished she didn’t have to put them back on. She fumbled for Carter’s hand, forced a smile, tried to distract herself. She played with a button on his shirt. “I don’t need to be the only one naked.”

A wave rushed up the beach. The chilly foam puffed her clothes and carried them away.

He bent down to her. She put her arms around his neck. His hands sought her face, his lips inches from hers. He pushed her gently back on the sand. His fingertips caressed her lips. Then they slid across her neck. She closed her eyes to enjoy the sensation.

He moved his mouth to her ear. She could hear him breathing slow, calm, even breaths. He whispered, “Tell me you’re afraid of me.”

“What?” Her eyes opened.

The fingers on her neck tightened. “You’re alone with a strange man in a strange place. You must be afraid of me.”

“Oh.” Was this his first time? Why would he try to sabotage it? She wrapped one leg around his. “No, I trust you.”

He looked off at the beach, at the sky. He said something under his breath.

“What was that?” she asked him.

He turned to her with eyes not filled with tenderness. “I said, I don’t want you to trust me.”

Another wave splashed over her head. He lunged on top of her. One knee pinned her right arm to the sand. The other knee impacted her sternum, knocking the air out of her chest and cracking a rib. He forced her other arm to the ground, leaving one hand with a tight grip on her throat. She struggled to catch a breath. Her lungs wouldn’t cooperate. The weight of his knee kept them down.

Inches from her face, he fixed his eyes on hers. “I want you to
fear
me.”

She struggled to break free, but he held her arm firm. She pushed against him into the unyielding wet sand beneath her. She couldn’t breathe. Seawater trickled into her mouth.

He relaxed his grip. She took air in one great rasp, desperate for that one precious substance. She coughed on droplets of saltwater. Her hands clawed at the sand.

“Say it!” he shouted. She could only cough, her throat felt like a crushed box of matches, sore, scratched, and igniting. She tried to speak but her mouth only made a pathetic “O” shape, like a turtle.

“Damn it, say it! I want to hear it!”

She was afraid, but she was also angry. The shock of her misperception burned to rage. She had been such a fool! She had trusted him. Now he stood between her and two million dollars. She still had fight within her. Between coughing and gasping she managed to spit out, “Fuck you, asshole.”

Asshole.
It wasn’t the word she would have chosen to be her last, but Carter gave up hope of hearing what he wanted. His hand constricted across her larynx. His thumb pressed until it collapsed. Now, even if he let go, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“That’s right,” he whispered. “Feel it.” Spittle flew into her face with every
f
. “Feel the power I have over you. The power of life and death. You know which I’m going to choose. This is
my
power.
This
is my power.” He rocked back and forth, rotating his body weight to her throat. “This is my power. This is
my
power.
This
is my power.” He repeated it like a mantra, quieter, as his fingers dug in and shook her head up and down. The back of her skull sank into the sand. Water pooled in her ears. Her hair caught in the outgoing waves.

“This is my power. This is
my
power.
This
is my power.”  A tear pushed out of his eye slits. Saliva bubbled from one side of his mouth. He didn’t make a pleasant last sight. She closed her eyes. Between her legs, her bowels released. Her strength left her. She stopped kicking.

She felt her own life slipping away.
I could pay you! I could pay you
, she thought, desperate now. Two million dollars is useless to a dead woman, but her dry lips wouldn’t move.

As her mind expended the last molecules of oxygen in her blood, as her lungs closed up shop and her vision went dark, the instant before she slipped off into that violent night, her emotion was one of confusion, perplexed by her final thought.

I never had a child
.

Emily was ten years old waking up in the bunk bed she shared with her older brother. Today she would not be a coward. Today, she would not leap from the bed to the floor. Today she could swing her feet down like normal people without fear of cold tentacles, slavering tongues, rending bicuspids, or shearing jaws of reptilian dentistry. Today, she would grow up.

She dangled her skinny bare legs over the edge.

Claws lunged out to snatch them.

Even after she heard the laughter of her brother emanating from the cavity below the bed, her brain had been imprinted, her synapses set, her instincts cemented into one everlasting belief: there
are
monsters and you’d best damn well respect them or get eaten.

The day before the cruise, waking up in a beautiful house at the end of a cul-de-sac in a small community on the outskirts of Minneapolis, she remembered that incident. Even as an adult she hesitated for a fraction of a second, hovering over the abyss. Then her groggy mind reminded her she’d bought a captain’s bed to specifically prevent a place for anyone to hide. In adulthood, the green slimy monsters morphed into rapists and burglars and axe murderers, but the emotion was the same. She slipped into her fuzzy slippers, the ones with the rubber grips on the bottom, and padded downstairs.

It was dark. She had a headache. She held onto the banister as she descended. The last thing she needed was a broken hip. No doubt her health insurance would deny her claim for some spurious reason and she’d lose the house to medical bills.

In the kitchen, the aspirin bottle didn’t have a tamper-proof seal. Weren’t these new? Had she used them already? Should she risk taking one? What if some freak had torn off the seal in the store and injected them with poison? She had read an article about that, or thought she did. A stabbing pain made the decision for her and she downed two.

She went back upstairs to take a shower. Little rubber flowers on the base of the tub prevented slips and falls. The shower curtain was transparent.  After seeing Psycho, she needed to survey the whole room and the door while showering. A transparent shower curtain gave her enough time to think of a suitable defense, while stark naked and wet, with shampoo stinging her eyes, against a knife wielding intruder.

Back at the kitchen table with her husband, she sipped her Free Trade decaf coffee and organic non-fat milk. She flicked on the weather. The reporter announced rain. “Crap,” she said. “Honey? Did you install the all-weather tires like I asked you to?”

“Nope.”

She muttered  deprecating things about her husband.

She liked to eat strawberries on her cereal, but first she washed them in the sink to rinse off any residual insecticides, pesticides, bird shit, worms, chemical treatments, and the contaminants of dozens of migrants and shoppers who handled them before they reached her table.

On her way out, she turned the light on in the garage as she opened the garage door. She locked the house, punching in the code on the security system. Before she got in the car, she took the compulsory glance in the back seat to see if anyone lay in wait for her. The car doors locked themselves as she drove out of the driveway. She steered out of the cul-de-sac, down the long central drive of her housing development, past the neighborhood association office, and out the wrought-iron gates that automatically closed behind her.

On the way to work, she kept her hands at ten and two, seatbelt on, no cell phones. At red lights, she left room between herself and the car in front, just enough to use as an escape path if carjackers decided her SUV made a fine target. It was still dark when she arrived at work, one of those long Minnesotan autumn nights. She parked in a lighted area, directly below a street lamp, careful not to park between a van or a truck where kidnappers and rapists waited on sweat-stained disco-ball-lit mattresses.

Upon exiting her vehicle, she opened the glove compartment and console to show would-be thieves she had nothing ready to steal. She arched her handbag with the strap across her shoulder to make it harder to snatch. She locked the car doors, took three steps, doubted she had locked them, went back, hit the lock button three times to be sure, visually checked that the locks were down, and walked away. As she made her way across the parking lot, she glanced back once or twice to make sure no one was following her.

“Early start to the day?” said someone in the office.

“I’m afraid so.”

At her desk she placed her purse in the desk drawer, locked it, and then stored the key in another desk drawer. She changed from sneakers into heels. Bent over, she noticed the void under her desk between the coat cabinet and the filing cabinet. If a disgruntled employee were ever to come to the office with a shotgun, this is where she would hide. She spotted it her first day and made that decision. She wasn’t in direct line-of-sight with the front door, which was good, so she would probably not be the first one shot and have time to duck into that dark recess unseen in the ensuing melee.

Yet, despite all her daily precautions, despite her wide spread paranoia inflicted by societal fear, she was done in by writing her name on a slip of paper. Her name, drawn from a hat in the annual office raffle, cast her out of society altogether. Now, stranded on a desert island, she knew real fear. She wondered if all of those little daily dramas back in the world would mean anything to her again.

Lauren disappeared. She wasn’t the only one missing. Howie was gone, too. No one could miss someone that big. And two people were missing from the other boat crews.

Emily knocked on Lauren’s door to wake her up. No one answered. She came back to try again after a breakfast of fish soup. When no one responded, she opened the door, thinking Lauren might be sick. The room was empty.

She thought Lauren might have spent the night with Carter. Last night she saw them sneak away from the fire together. She found Carter eating breakfast alone, and he confessed he hadn’t seen her since he returned to the camp.

Emily sat in Lauren’s empty room looking for a clue. She touched the pictures on Lauren’s wall. Irrelevant strangers smiled down at her. She searched for a photo of Lauren, as if she would have left one behind, or a clue to her disappearance. “Where are you?” she wondered aloud.

She could hear Paul calling her for work detail. She wondered what he would do if she just refused to go.

Emily pulled the pictures off the wall, one by one. Not Lauren. Not Lauren.
This is her room. These people shouldn’t be here.
She thought of burning the wallet-size portraits, but she didn’t have the heart. Whether the survivors lived or died, someone out there loved them. She stacked the pictures in a neat little pile beside the door. She planned on doing the same thing in her room when she got back. 

She sat back to examine the room one last time before stepping out. Removing the pictures exposed some kind of writing on the wall.

Paul called again. She could hear Paul’s footsteps approaching the room next door.

She reached up and brushed her hand against the white fiberglass. Blocky, black letters appeared. She tried to make out the words, scraping off a bit of sand here and there. They were stenciled, like you see on industrial containers. Wherever this big piece of fiberglass had originated, it had been part of a boat.

The best she could tease out were the letters “RIN” and “DWA”. The rest had long ago worn off.

Rin Dwa. Foreign? No. There must be more to it. She was never very good at Wheel of Fortune. The contestants always solved the puzzle before she could.

Rin Dwa
.
Rin Dwa.

Nope. Nothing.

Now Paul rapped on Lauren’s door. “Let’s go, Lauren? Emily? It’s not time to sleep in, girls.”

She surprised him when she came out of Lauren’s hut.

“Where’s Lauren?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She isn’t in there.”

Not a flicker of care reflected on his face. “Fine. Then fall in.” He pushed her toward the line.

Paul split her off from Mason and Carter to spend the day with another survivor – Eddie. They were assigned to catch fish. Amy was right. Catching fish was far harder than the greenhouse.

Two White Hairs, Marvin and Dumbo, ran the fishing operation. Dumbo didn’t actually introduce himself by that name, but Marvin did. Marvin was a wiry black man, originally from Brooklyn. She recognized the accent. White hair made him look old, though he was probably still in his thirties. When she pried him for his background he told her with a laugh, “None of your business.”

Dumbo was a very, very large man, both in height and girth. He had the strength of three men and seemed to defy the ocean just by wading in. What he had in strength he lacked in intelligence. Simple minded, he did whatever Marvin told him. Dumbo didn’t have any hair at all.

Each night, Marvin and Dumbo spread a wide net at the bottom of a small inlet. This net, like everything else on the island, had been woven together with twisted strands of plastic.

In the morning, they would stand on either side of the bay and pull the net inland. Two more people, in this case Emily and Eddie, would collect the fish trapped in the net. They waded in, waist deep, hauling plastic buckets. The buckets floated beside them while they caught the fish bare-handed and tossed them in. It was difficult work. The fish thrashed in the net, tangled and defensive, but the two men on shore never slowed down. At one point, to her surprise, she even wrestled a white tipped reef shark. Had she known before she got it into her basket, she would have screamed.

Emily still wore Howie’s shoes, double laced around the ankles. The rubber soles protected her from the razor sharp volcanic rocks, but they fit so poorly that she fell often. By the end of the morning her feet wrinkled like prunes.

Twice Emily slipped on wet rocks and got tangled up in the net. Each time the two men on shore cursed her in the coarse language of sailors. Spiny fins scraped her hands and arms. The sun burned every inch of exposed skin. Spray from incoming waves splashed salt in her eyes.

All morning, Dumbo wouldn’t stop singing. He sang the same song, over and over, a catchy little jingle from decades past:

Yum yum bumblebee, bumblebee tuna…

I love bumblebee, bumblebee tuna…

After ten minutes, she couldn’t get it out of her head. When she walked out of earshot, she found herself humming it. It echoed in her skull.

Marvin seemed to tune it out, but it drove Eddie crazy. Eddie told Dumbo to stop, once. He looked like he wanted to add a threat but then reconsidered. Marvin looked up at him. “No, man. It’s all he’s got. He’s a one note kind of guy.”

Not long after, Emily heard Eddie humming it to himself, then cursing under his breath.

Halfway through hauling in the net, something in the water caught her eye. She brought her hand to her forehead. What appeared to be a white log bobbed just off the end of the bay. It was too big to be a fish.

“What is that?” She pointed it out to Marvin. He didn’t look up at first, blatantly ignoring her. Finally he rolled his eyes in her direction with exasperation and then rolled them out to sea. Riveted, he tapped Dumbo on the arm and pointed.

“It’s a body,” he said. “Probably floated in from your ship.”

Now she could make out white colored clothing. It must have been one of the staff. Horror chilled her. Who was it? How did the body float all the way over here?

“Well, don’t just stare at it. Go get it.” Marvin pointed at Emily and then at the body.

“What?! I’m not touching that thing.”

“Go get it,” he said again. “We need it. For fertilizer.”

She knew what he meant. Whenever she closed her eyes she imagined the remains of Max on the compost heap. Mason shielded her eyes when she passed Max, so, technically, she had never seen a dead body before, much less touched one.

“I can’t. I can’t. There’s no way.”

Eddie didn’t offer to help.

Marvin shrugged, striding out along the rocks with Dumbo in tow. They waded into water up to their hips, each taking one end of the body, and rolled it up on shore. Rooting around in a supply pile, Marvin found a large, black plastic bag. He held it as Dumbo tilted the body up into the bag. They waved Eddie over. “Take this in to the farms for compost.” Eddie, who didn’t seem to have high spirits in the first place, took the bag. He pulled it like a sledge back across the Flow. 

Emily stared. Who was it? Was it the Captain? She’d had dinner with him, when was that, three nights ago? Three nights ago she’d been eating dinner, laughing, enjoying her prize. Now she was digging bodies out of the ocean and picking salt out of her fingernails.

Emily reached for her bottle of hand sanitizer. The plastic throat gave a tiny gasp. Empty.

Once Dumbo pulled the net in they had to help drag it back out. As she and Eddie pulled, the White Hairs inspected it for tears. There were quite a few, cut up or unwoven when the fish struggled. The men had nimble fingers and a few plastic bags handy. If it was a simple tear, they pulled a stick out of the fire, held the flame to the net, and allowed the plastic to melt together. If the hole was too large for that, they took new plastic bags or bottles out of a heap beside them, tore the bags into strips, and wove new strands. This they attached, again by burning. Plastic was the most useful item on the island.