Red Sand (21 page)

Colin feigned fear, winced, and turned abruptly toward the Gate. That did it. They craned their necks to stare out into the grey. They were on edge already, and this spooked them.

He bent to the fuse. It snuffed out two thirds from the end. If he lit it now, he had five seconds to get clear. Not enough time. He wiped his mouth and thought.

C&C still stared into the rain. “What is it Colin? What do you see?”

He didn’t have time to think. He tried to light it again. His wet hands doused the braid. The match burned but the fuse didn’t catch. Despite the damp, the match burned his fingers. He placed his hand on the Gate but then drew it away instantly. He could feel vibrations through the door as the Creepers moved on the other side.

The rain lost its appeal. “What are you doing down there, Colin? It’s too late to pray.”

He lit a second match. This time the fuse caught. He turned and ran.

Cliff’s laughter followed him. “Hey, Colin, don’t be rude. Your friends are knocking! You want I should let them in?”

The explosion flattened Colin like a giant's hand. Pieces of trunk and Chuck pelted him. Salt and smoke burned his eyes. Dark red shapes writhed past. He watched them swarm around him, moving swiftly across the lava flow toward the Manor House. He expected them to take him any minute, but they didn't touch him. Why?

He was on fire. In the confusion, pressure, and pain he didn't even realize that a blaze blackened his back even now. He screamed and heaved up on his feet. Water! He needed water! He ran straight for the ocean.

Creepers splayed out across the Flow, their tentacles writhing wildly, their pods popping off and dashing ahead of him. They gave him a wide berth, tumbling over one another to get out of his way. All these years he'd lived in deathly fear of these lithe creatures, yet now they feared him, the human torch.

He ran, arms out, toward the embrace of the sea. Despite the chaos and horror around him, despite the Pain, Colin smiled. Every step through chaos brought him closer to the ocean. At last, he would leave the island.

He didn’t even pause at the edge of the cliff, the same spot he spent so many days dreaming of other variations of this same action. He launched himself into open air. An inhuman shriek erupted from his tongueless hole as his flaming body plummeted toward the sea like a meteorite. He plunged into a wave at the base of the cliff in a plume of foam, extinguishing the flames and smacking the air from his lungs. The next wave lifted him like a pallbearer, delivering him into the grip of the nearest barbed rock. His body dashed against the wall like so much chum. At last, the tide pulled his hollow hide out to drift on the open sea, facedown, arms spread wide, embracing his destiny.

Mason stumbled across the Flow as fast as he could. The rain blew in every direction. He put down his futile arm. It was impossible to stay dry.

He wondered where Amy went. Everything happened so fast he didn’t even stop to wonder if he put her in danger. Wherever she was going with Paul and Eddie, up the mountain, it had to be safer than here. Mason felt a brief stab of jealousy, seeing Amy run off behind Eddie, but then he discounted it.

When he arrived in the Manor House, Tuk cast a disdainful look at this wet intruder. “You’re dripping on my carpet.”

“Ados sent me for the other two boxes.”

Tuk waved him on.

Mason wasted no time. He only had seconds now before the Gate went.

When he entered the cave, the light was already on. Angel stood over the fish basket, inspecting the items Colin had spilled. “What’s this?”

“We were in a hurry. They must have fallen out. I’ll put them in a crate now.”

Angel didn’t buy the story, but Mason was already picking up the items and tossing them into the nearest container. He stood watching from the doorway, arms crossed, blocking the exit.

The explosion rocked the house. The walls billowed and creaked. The ground shook. It felt as if the hurricane tossed an oil tanker on the Flow.

Angel and Tuk rushed out to see the source. Mason knew.

He backed further into the shadows of the cave. Gingerly placed beside the remaining dynamite, Colin had left him a fuse and a flare. He pulled the cap off the flare, blinked as the dazzling magnesium lit up the cave, and lit the fuse. He left the burning flare on the floor and ran out… directly into Angel’s broad chest.

Angel didn’t wait for Mason to recover. He lifted Mason by the arm and leg and catapulted him across the table. His eyes glowed red. “I don’t know what you boys think you’re doing…”

He never finished his sentence. A wall of flame erupted from the cave like a cannon, incinerating Angel on the spot. It blew out the wall of the building like balsa wood. Fire and the intruding rain battled for possession of scraps of debris as they tumbled out into the Flow. Mason’s ears rang, and all the hair on his forearms curled and burnt. If Angel hadn’t thrown him…

“My God, man! What have you done!” Tuk stood incapacitated by disbelief, framed in the doorway by a round of lightning. “All that I’ve built!” He held out his hands, those same two hands, stepping toward him. “You’re wasting it! Why?!”

Mason could barely hear him. He recovered enough to blurt out, “You blew up my ship!”

Tuk regained his composure. “You found out the truth. No matter. I would have told you tonight.”

“Why? Why would you destroy a cruise ship?”

Something outside distracted Tuk. He slammed the door shut and began moving furniture while he talked, “We are hunters, you and I. Just like the Paleolithic men before us. While our caves are better appointed,” he waved his hand around the richly furnished, now smoking, room, “they are caves nonetheless.” He jammed a chair underneath the doorknob. “Just like whalers, we hunt at sea. But our Leviathan is man-made.” He inspected it to make sure the door wouldn’t open, turned, and saw the gaping hole in the wall, open to the outdoors.  “We reap what we can of supplies, rescue the survivors, and give them a new life here, with us. A free life.”

Mason couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

Tuk stumbled over the rubble to the absent wall. He stood silently surveying what must have been a devastating scene. “Just as the great whale hunters of old had no shortage of prey, so do those who would prey on man,” he seemed to say to himself. The rain flattened his white hair. He looked very old. When he spoke again, he did so as if he had rehearsed it to the point where he didn’t need to pay attention anymore. “You’re a bright young man, strong enough to survive this long. We can use you. Join us.” He turned to face Mason, holding out his arms just as he did in welcome that first day. ”You belong with us. Help us build something real. Let us dye your hair white and enjoy living within the Wall.”

“The Wall is gone.” Mason rolled off the table and was in the process of standing when a living mass of coiling Creepers swarmed through the hole. They fell over Tuk like a flood.

Mason pressed himself up against the wall, wishing he could levitate. He couldn’t tear his eyes off the roiling mass of pods that tackled Tuk. His corpse provided such a bloody frenzy that they had not yet sensed him in the room. More pods piled through the gaping hole in the wall, silent beneath the thunderous crush of rain on the roof.

Maybe he could go out the roof, climb the cliff to safety. The tarpaulins sagged under an immense weight of water. Droplets of moisture presaged an imminent collapse. Mason clung to the wainscoting to get off the floor. He felt the ceiling, turgid against the onslaught outside. He swiped Tuk’s knife off the table and leapt on top of a china cabinet. With one hand still gripping the wall, he reached out with the other.

The knife ripped through the tarp like air. Great sheets of water gushed down on the pods, rolling them out the wall. Rain flashed through the gaping hole in a torrent. One glimpse up the wet cliff face gave him no hope of escaping in that direction. He leapt off the wall to follow the wave out. Where Tuk had fallen, the Creepers left nothing behind.

Water pounded him the instant he stepped outside. His eyes refused to remain open as the lashes failed against an onslaught of spray. Half blind, still half deaf from the explosion, he stumbled around the building until he hugged the rock face.

All around him, the pods recovered from the flood. In fact, they multiplied, sprouting tendrils in the water like high speed hydroponics. Each new tendril grew its own pod and then split in two.

Through the insanity, Mason caught a glimpse of the staircase leading up to the top of the Wall. Without a second thought, he took them two at a time.

A small river washed down the steps. He slipped as a saturated ledge gave way beneath him. Two tendrils hissed up behind him to catch his feet, but retracted immediately when they came in contact with the salt. Even half destroyed, it still worked its magic. He clambered up out of reach on hands and knees.

Once at the top of the wall, Mason surveyed the damage. Out on the dunes, Departure Camp bloomed with pods. He couldn’t even make out the structures beneath the vegetation. Anyone who sought refuge there had no hope at all.

A mountain of blackened, shriveled pods lay against the outside wall, covered by an even more immense mass of living ones. The sheer pressure of the invaders coming off the hurricane soaked sand pressed them against the salt, killing them
en masse
. Each new wave tumbled over the first, only to die beneath the next. Those vegetable bodies piled up quickly, and it wouldn’t be long before they covered the wall completely, creating a sacrificial ramp for their brethren to pour over the top and into the compound. He had no more than ten minutes before the breach.

Inside the compound, there wasn’t much left for the pods to destroy. The housing looked like a lost city, wrapped in thick vines. Much of it collapsed under the weight of vegetation.

The rain was responsible for its own bit of calamity. Streams raced down the mountain like wet lava. On the plain, these streams met in flash floods. One such monster had torn out the supports of the greenhouses. It proceeded to rip them apart, one section at a time, bearing them like coffins to the sea.

Only the salt pools remained Creeper free. Water filled them and coursed over the edges. A battlefield of raindrops pockmarked the surface. The pod’s tentacles wrapped them like boa constrictors, around and around, but would not enter the brackish pools, even as they filled with fresh water.

In the middle of the furthest pool, three survivors huddled, rain shearing off them like fountains. He couldn’t make out who they were. If they stayed put, they looked safe. Perhaps they could wait out the storm.

Mason felt a moment of hope. If he could join them, he just might make it. The only thing that prevented him was… his eyes searched out every path to the pool. The only thing preventing him was the absence of a continuous wall between him and the sea, a quarter of a mile of man-eating vegetables and strangling vines, and three flash floods boiling over razor sharp igneous rock. He let out a long, slow breath. “Right,” he said, all hope abandoned.

With an enormous crack, the Manor House pushed away from the cliff. A geyser of water erupted from the cave he had just evacuated. The explosion must have tapped into a hidden river which now burst forth from the cliff, pushing the entire structure across the plain the way a fire hose pushes a leaf.  The dining hall, the housing, all reduced immediately to their component parts. Hunks of steel and fiberglass and plastic churned across the plain like a horizontal tornado, crushing and rending each other in a race to the sea.

With horror, Mason watched that devastating force head directly for the three figures in the pool. In a momentary whisper, they were gone. They never had a chance.

Neither did Mason. He knew that now. He must be the only person left alive on the island. As soon as those creatures reached the top of the wall, even that statistical anomaly would be remedied. Water, everywhere, soaked the walls, poured into his eyes, pounded his head.

Somewhere in the gale, he heard a high pitched keening. He couldn’t make it out. With dull resignation, he expected one last threat to emerge from the dark clouds and deliver him to his maker.

No. It was a whistle, the same whistle he’d heard in the water a lifetime ago. Amy! The whistle came from behind him on the cliff. He turned to see, not ten feet above him, a face peering through the gloaming. A blurry hand waved him up.

He reached the end of the wall where it crumbled into Mt. Elvis. A hand reached down for him over the black rock. He looked up to see Eddie’s face. Both men paused for a split second, then Eddie reached further. “Come on! The salt is going to fail!”

Sure enough, a crack formed under Mason’s feet. A bolt of lightning lit up the sky as half the wall slid away, crashing into a sea of Creepers like an iceberg in Hell. Mason leapt for Eddie’s hand. As he crested the rock, Paul and Amy reached for him as well.

“We saw everything! We waited for you!” Amy hugged him.

Eddie’s eyes narrowed.

“We can’t stay here!” Paul pointed to the pile of Creepers already slithering up the face of Elvis. “We have to get higher!” He started up an almost invisible path.

“After you,” Mason shouted at Eddie. After a moment’s hesitation, Eddie jogged to catch up with Paul. Mason helped Amy next and took up the rear.
Which one do you take across Mount Elvis first? The sheep or the wolf?

An hour later, he thought they’d never reach the summit. His arms burned. His legs shook. More than once the wind almost wiped him off the mountain. Above them, the black cone stretched on forever, the top boiling in angry clouds. Mason tried not to think at all, just put one foot in front of the other. He had an old man, a hated enemy, and a woman in front of him. He couldn’t show any weakness now. “Where are we going?” No one answered.

Around the next bend, everyone disappeared. He stopped, panting. Had he missed a turn? Had they all fallen? He shielded his eyes hopelessly and peered through the curtain of droplets.

“Paul!”

Panic rose in him. He’d never find his way up or down without Paul.

“Amy!?”

Only the wind answered him. Reluctantly he shouted for the last person he wanted to save him, again. “Eddie!?”

Eddie’s head appeared out of a shadow. “In here!”

It was a cave. Paul and Amy waited for him in the darkness.

“What is this place?”

“It’s a cave.” Eddie rolled his eyes.

“Are there bats?” Amy peered into the darkness. 

“Yes. Are you afraid of bats?”

She tried to shake her head convincingly. “I don’t want to stay here.”

Paul chimed in. “We’re not staying. We’ll rest here, but then we’re going back out as soon as the hurricane’s eye passes over us.”

“What?” Eddie didn’t look happy. “Why? It’s dry. There’re no creatures. Let’s stay in here.”

Paul ushered Eddie over to the mouth of the cave. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“No.”

Paul pushed him forward. A few feet from the entrance, the ground dropped away. It was a dizzying view, and Eddie stepped back immediately. “Now maybe a little scared.”

Paul pushed him forward again. “No. Look.”

Eddie leaned out again, looking down the wall. He froze a moment, and then breathed out, “Fuck me.”

Those two blasphemous words uttered with such reverence chilled Mason to the bone. He carefully leaned past Eddie to look down.

The gray light afforded a view straight down the cliff. Not two hundred yards from them, Creepers boiled in a tangle of vegetable flesh. Rising. “Yeah, fuck you, let’s get out of here.”

“Not so fast.” Paul moved to the back of the cave. “You have to help me get a few things.”

“Bats?” Amy said, but followed him anyway.

From a hidden crack, Paul produced a small fish oil lamp and lit it by striking a rock against the wall. Smoky flames illuminated the cave in an orange glow. It tunneled back into the mountain in darkness.