Authors: Unknown
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.
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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 87
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.
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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 only 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.
Culann fished out of his pocket an already-rolled joint he’d found in Worner’s cabin. He lit it, inhaled and immediately coughed. It had been ten years since he’d last done this. Worner’s place had proved a treasure trove because it also contained two shelves of books. True to his word, Worner had been the most well-read man in Pyrite.
Amidst volumes on horticulture, government conspiracies of various stripes, and the occult origins of the Third Reich, Culann had found a pocket-edition of
Robinson Crusoe
, which he now read on the dock, leaning against a couple of dogs who served as a backrest. Alphonse curled up next to him.
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He took four or five hits and found himself very stoned. Maybe it was because he was out of practice or perhaps Worner had managed to engineer a particularly potent strain of cannabis. Culann laid the book down on his lap and took in his surroundings.
The drizzling rain was cool against his skin, and the fog seemed to thicken by the minute.
Between the fog and the dogs enveloping him, Culann imagined himself in the bosom of a great fluffy cloud. He pushed thoughts of death from his mind and concentrated on the utter tranquility of the now-deserted island.
He thought he saw an orange light off in the distance. Then it disappeared. He squinted his eyes and saw it again, a little larger this time. It seemed to be moving towards him. It flickered ever so slightly as it approached. Culann remembered fairy tales his Irish grandmother had told him about the will-o’-the-wisp that led disobedient little boys off into the darkness. As the light loomed larger, he heard the sound of oars in the water. Someone was coming.
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The Diary of Culann Riordan, Day 14
I’ve never been very religious. As a good Irish boy, I went through all of the
standard Catholic rituals, first out of fear of damnation and then just to keep my mom
happy. Then I stopped trying to keep my mom happy. To avoid a conflict, I made a point
to never be at my parents’ house in the morning of a day when church attendance was
expected. That way my mom could plausibly assume I’d already gone. I’m sure she
suspected the truth, but was kind enough not to force me to choose between lying to her
and disappointing her.
Recent events, I suppose, should have tried my faith, if I’d had any. Or maybe
they should have driven me back to God. No atheists in foxholes and all that. But I’m not
really an atheist. That would require making a decision and taking a stand. I’m just a guy
that would rather sleep in on Sundays.
Worner’s crazy books on Nazi witchcraft and four-legged saints have nudged me
to consider the spiritual side of life anew. After what I’ve seen in the last few weeks, it’s
hard to be skeptical of anything. Virtually everything I once believed about the world has
been proven false. Maybe I can uncover a deeper truth, even if there’s no one for me to
share it with.
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Culann stood as the boat pulled into view. The dogs surrounding him whined nervously. He still considered the possibility that this was all a drug-induced hallucination, but it certainly seemed real enough. An eighteen-foot canoe cut through the fog. A lantern dangled from a pole at the bow. Just behind the lantern, a figure paddled off the port side. Another figure stood astride the middle of the canoe, pointing towards the shore. At the stern sat a third figure who paddled off the starboard side. As the canoe approached, the two paddlers pulled in their oars and allowed the boat to glide over to Culann.