Apocalypse Island (2 page)

Chapter 122

Chapter 123

Chapter 124

Chapter 125

Chapter 126

Chapter 127

Chapter 128

Chapter 129

Chapter 130

Chapter 131

Chapter 132

Chapter 133

Chapter 134

Chapter 135

Chapter 136

Chapter 137

EPILOGUE

“A light shines in the darkness but the darkness does not understand it.”

—John 1:5

“No man is a complete mystery but to himself”

—Proust

PART ONE

DANNY WOLF

Prologue

Frigid air crawled across Amy’s bare skin. She blinked her eyes, trying to pierce the darkness.

God, she was freezing, shivering, lying on what felt like a narrow bed of some kind. She could feel the slight give of a mattress beneath her.

She tried to move, but her entire body felt frozen in place, like the paralysis one sometimes experiences in dreams.

Could
this be a dream?

She dismissed the thought almost immediately.

She rolled her eyes upward and around trying to see where she was, but it was no use, the place was totally dark.

She heard something shift in the room and knew that she was not alone.

Her ears strained. She thought she heard a soft whisper. “Who are you?” she said. “Where am I?”

No reply.

She wracked her brain trying to remember how she’d gotten here. She remembered being pissed off and leaving the club alone, walking up India Street toward home, and then, someone very strong put a hand over her mouth. But it wasn’t just a hand. It was huge, and covered in hair. And there was something in it. A rag that smelled of chemicals. And that’s all she remembered.

Until now.

Her insides tightened with fear. Why couldn’t she move? She smelled something sweet, sickening, a lingering of chemicals. Bile rose in her throat. She swallowed it back as panic rose in her like a swelling tide.

She had to pee.

This had to be a dream, a nightmare. Lying on an uncomfortable bed, unable to move, with someone hiding in the darkness.

But it didn’t feel like a dream. She’d never been able to reason, to rationalize her dreams while in the midst of them. Now that’s exactly what she was doing. This whole thing was very wrong. There was a realness, a substance to this that made her insides quiver.

She remembered being out drinking with her friends. They were all into this dark goth thing. Like a lot of young people these days, they’d read Twilight and a bunch of other dumb romances that tried to disguise themselves as horror.

Amy thought they were stupid.

Just the same, she’d fallen right in step with them. She read the books, wore the clothes, got the piercings and the tattoos.

God, what a stupid little idiot.

They talked a lot about a legendary man, a king of some stupid island. Supposedly he was dark and handsome with mesmeric powers and he roamed the streets at night frequenting the downtown clubs looking for that special someone to make his queen.

Yeah, right.

“It’s true,” her friend Sadie La Blanc had said. “I’ve never seen him, but Janet Owen has. She even talked to him. And she said he was the most amazing man she’d ever met.”

It was definitely a radical story, even a little enticing, but that’s all it was. A story. A big load of crap.

Brainless little twits.

Come to think of it, none of them had seen Janet around for several days.

So to appease her idiot friends, Amy had agreed to go along with their stupid little fantasy, hang out in the clubs and drink and wait and watch and just maybe one of them would get lucky and be propositioned by this elusive stranger.

In reality Amy had already found her dark and handsome mystery man. But she wasn’t about to tell any of these idiots about him. He was the new lead singer in the band, and God, he was
so cute
and such a good lover. But tonight he was ignoring her.

She got angry, and the more she drank the angrier she became. Finally she got up and left the club, just like that. To hell with them. To hell with
him.
And the next thing she remembered was the huge hairy hand over her mouth, and the smelly rag.

“Please,” she said, having a hard time moving her mouth. “What do you want?”

Another soft whisper.

A small dim light came on somewhere in the darkened room but the glow it cast was weird and diffused. She imagined she could see two red eyes staring at her from out of the darkness.

She blinked and the eyes were gone.

Oh, Jesus, someone please help me.

She willed her limbs to move, but it was no use. They would not budge.

She tried to scream but her voice was weak, nearly useless.

Her bladder relaxed and she felt the warm wetness spreading out on the mattress beneath her.

“Will somebody please
help
me,”
she said, but her throat was constricted and the words were barely audible.

How long had she been here?

Minutes?

Hours?

Days?

She had no idea.

It was so cold in here. Why was it so cold? A tremor rippled through her.

Again she strained to move and again she failed.

She heard footsteps approaching.

She tried to scream but it came out a croak.

Then she saw a vague figure moving toward her through the oozing light.

Could this be the one they had all been talking about? Was this the king searching for that special someone to make his queen? It seemed preposterous, especially when you considered the fact that he hadn’t seduced her at all. He’d subdued her with a fucking chemical-soaked rag.

Her tired eyes strained to make out his features.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

“Why can’t I see you?”

“It’s dark in here.”

“No, something’s wrong.”

“Oh, sweetie, all you have to do is concentrate.”

And that’s what Amy did, but something still wasn’t right. This was some sort of game, wasn’t it? A joke?

Panic seized her heart as her captor came into focus.

“Oh, dear God, you’re not—”

“That’s right, sweetheart, I’m not. Surprised?”

“Please. Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

“Don’t be afraid. It’ll be over before you know it.”

Amy saw the knife then, and it looked so big, so real, so...evil. It had a curved blade sharpened on both edges. But she still didn’t understand any of this. God, she knew she was dreaming. She
had
to be dreaming. This couldn’t be real.

“Why did you do it, Amy?”

“Do what?”

“You know what, you little whore. Why were you trying to corrupt him?
Why?
”

“I...I...Please don’t hurt me.”

“Why did you do it?”
The knife descended, the point coming to rest between her quivering breasts.

“I liked him,” she whimpered, knowing it was both the truth and a lie. She hardly even knew him, but when she looked into his eyes she hadn’t been able to control her emotions. It was like he had hypnotized her.

“You really messed up, Amy.”

“I won’t do it again. I promise. Just don’t hurt me. Please.”

“Too late.”

The point of the knife pierced her skin and blood began to flow. A stinging line that felt like fire ran straight down her torso. She drew in her stomach muscles, as if she could somehow escape the blade, even as it continued slowly down, all the way to her pubic mound.

Amy watched horrified. “Why are you doing this?” she sobbed.

“Because I have to,” the killer said.

Then two more quick cuts across her breasts, deep and soulful. Amy was moaning now, crying, out of control. “Please, don’t hurt me any more. I don’t want to die.”

The knife cut deeper.

Amy opened her mouth, and finally the screams came.

Chapter 1

Six weeks earlier

Danny Wolf woke from the dream and lay in the darkness of his cell listening to the wind howling outside the prison walls. His pulse drummed in his ears as his breath ebbed and flowed in rhythmic bursts. He felt like he had run a marathon. He wondered if he had cried out in his sleep.

In the dream he had been on the run from a group of men with dogs. It was early winter, cold, and he could see his breath puffing from his mouth in frozen white clouds. As dawn rose, a silvery moon sat perched on the western horizon like some colossal stage prop.

He remembered picking up a trail and following its convolutions, hearing the baying hounds behind him as they quickly closed the gap between them.

He rounded a corner in the trail and came to a stuttering halt. A young woman lay on her back, her half naked body covered in stab wounds, a bloody cross carved like a fiery beacon on her upper torso.

Wolf walked slowly toward the dead woman and stared down at her as a great flood of sorrow seized him.

He went down onto his haunches, intending to pick her up and take her someplace safe when he heard the renewed baying of bloodhounds, closer now, more urgent. And now he heard the angry commands of men. Not knowing what else to do, he stood and bolted into a run, down the trail toward whatever waited him at the end.

And that’s when he came awake...

Chapter 2

He lay still in his bunk trying to stay his beating heart, wondering why the dream was always the same, knowing that it meant
something
—perhaps it was the key to everything bad in his life—but knowing also that he was no closer to unraveling its mysteries than he had ever been.

He got up and paced the floor for a long time, back and forth in front of the bed, trying to puzzle it out, waiting for his heart to settle down. Finally, after what seemed like hours he lay back down and listened to the relentless roar of the wind outside, lulling him back to sleep and into the midst of another troubling dream.

In this dream he shared his bed with the ghost of a woman, her dress little more than gauze, her skin glowing, her black hair falling across her face. Though lifeless, the woman became animated with demonic energy as she pressed her pale lips to his ear.

They wish to destroy you, Danny. Don’t let them do it.

Who wants to destroy me?

The ones who destroyed me. The ones who will destroy us all.

Who are they?

Those who wish us to remain silent. Beware, Danny. And please know that I will always love you.

She turned her pale face to him and her eyes contained the deepest darkness he had ever seen. He reached out for her but she was gone.

He woke not with a scream but with a cry of anguish, and sat on the edge of the bed, his wet face in his hands.

Although his heart raced with fear his grief was greater than his terror. The memory of Siri left him half crushed by a sense of loss as heavy as the world itself. What had become of her? How could he have lost her so completely?

All was quiet on the cellblock as darkness pressed in on him like a weight. He wondered if he was strong enough to make it until dawn.

As if the life he’d had to endure in this place wasn’t bad enough, as if the terrible things in his head and heart weren’t sufficient, now
she
had come into his dreams—the only woman he had ever truly loved—the woman he never wanted to think about again because it hurt so much to think about her. Now she had returned as a ghost woman delivering a warning, trying to force him to see what he could not see.

Each time he reached back into his clouded past for answers, it always came out the same: he could not be sure of anything. The more he tried to make sense of his life, the more the mystery deepened. Nearly five years had passed in this dark and angry place and he understood almost nothing about the demons that haunted his existence.

Chapter 3

Though he was in prison for a crime of violence, Danny Wolf was not a violent person. Actually he was just the opposite. He was an artist, a musician who prided himself on avoiding trouble because trouble was an expense he could not afford. But trouble had found him on a dark night filled with omens. Following a gig, drunk, he had gotten into a fight with a patron. The patron, a guy named Shaun Talbot had been bothering Siri for weeks, and when Wolf had finally confronted him, Talbot had challenged him to a fight. In the ensuing scuffle in an alley behind the bar his adversary had fallen, his head contacting the edge of a trash dumpster.