“What is this place?” Casey mused.
Billy shook his head. “Looks like an outpost,” he said. “Weather station or something. No sign that anyone’s been here for awhile though.”
He opened a small white refrigerator at the other end of the room, and gagged when the stench hit him. Black fuzz coated the inside of the appliance, along with unrecognizable lumps of something that no doubt had once been food. He quickly slammed the door shut.
“Generator’s apparently been out of fuel for quite awhile,” he pronounced, still coughing.
They stepped back out of the hut, and now the cool air of the foliage brought a chill to their exposed skin. Jess had an overwhelming desire to pull on a T-shirt. Playing
Blue Lagoon
was all well and good when you knew nobody else was around, but now she was a bit discomfited that obviously somebody had been to this island.
Mark read her thoughts and put an arm on her shoulders. “Whoever it was, they haven’t been here in a long time. Months maybe. I don’t think we have to worry about them coming back this particular weekend just to spoil our party!”
“C’mon,” Billy said. “Let’s see what’s on the opposite shore. This island isn’t that big; it can’t be much farther.”
They continued walking, but everyone seemed a bit quieter than an hour before. The leaves made the only sound as they shifted in the slight wind.
“Have you noticed there are not even any birds here?” Mark said at one point. “It’s so quiet—no bugs buzzing, no birds calling…”
“It
is
still,” Billy agreed. “Probably just cuz we’re so far out from the mainland. Think of it this way, that’s just more proof that it’s an uninhabited island.”
“There are spiders,” Jess declared. “Freakin’ ugly spiders.”
Just as she said that, the group stepped through a stand of bushes and were suddenly out of the foliage and back on open beach.
“No spiders here,” Billy said, and pointed to the white sand that extended from the edge of their feet into the crystal clear water just a few yards away. “Anyone want to see if there are fish?”
With that he took off running towards the water. Casey joined him. “Last one in,” she called. Mark and Jess laughed and followed. When they were all chest deep in the water, Casey turned to Jess and pointed to her bikini top, noting, “Um, these costumes don’t really cling very well.” Her naked breast broke the surface of the water briefly, as she demonstrated that the tan triangle had slipped easily to the side.
“Exhibitionist,” Jess accused. “Mine stayed on just fine.”
“Mine could use a little adjusting,” Mark suggested, rubbing up against her thigh to make it obvious that his privates had also slipped out of his loincloth after their short swim.
She reached down and encircled the stray organ, and with a smile, slipped him back inside the fabric. “Down boy,” she laughed.
Mark shook his head and bent to kiss her. “Nuh-uh,” he answered.
From behind them, Casey called out, “We’re going to swim for awhile.”
Mark grinned, and pulled Jess back out of the water towards the beach.
“Right now?” she whispered, glancing at the two playfully wrestling in the water behind them.
“They’ll stay out there awhile,” he promised. “Probably doing the same thing.”
“Ew, with the fish?” she grimaced.
He pulled her into the shade of a bush and kissed her, hard. His hands roamed the wet skin of her back and thighs, trailing up between the cleft of her ass and then cupping her behind to pull her even tighter to him. When he broke the kiss, Jess’s eyes were on fire.
“OK,” she breathed heavily. “Right now.”
She pulled the tie on her bikini and he did the same, just before kneeling to suck one dark nipple gently between his lips. He bit down playfully, and she moaned. “Pick a position,” she whispered. “Cuz one of us is getting sand in their ass.”
“Missionary,” he said, and helped her lay down in the cool sand.
“You’re
such
a gentleman,” she said, but didn’t protest. She laid down on the sand and opened her thighs provocatively.
“I won’t be a gentleman in a second.”
Jess cried out as he entered her, and stifled herself with a finger.
“You can let go,” he encouraged, “No one will hear.” And soon enough, she did. Her heels dug in and pressed against the sand, and she raised her knees to let him in deeper. It was strangely erotic, to be pressing her feet through cool sand as he dripped warm salty water across her chest. She pressed her feet deeper into the sand until her toes met something that didn’t shift. Cold. A rock. She curled her toes around it as Mark cried out his own finish, and smiled as he wilted against her, resting his head on her chest.
Then as the fog of pleasure faded and the world suddenly took shape again around them, the sand began to itch between her ass cheeks and she gently pushed him up. He rolled to the side and she sat up, looking for her bikini top in the much-disturbed sand.
It lay just beyond her knee, and as she bent forward, she saw the rock that her foot had been massaging. Only, it wasn’t a rock.
“Oh god,” she whispered. “Mark?”
Mark had rolled on his back, but he opened his eyes at the tone of her voice. “What’s the matter?”
“Tell me that isn’t what it looks like,” she said, pulling her foot as far away from the white thing in the sand as she could.
Mark reached out and pulled the thing from the sand and stared into a pair of open eyesockets. Yellowed, bare teeth grinned back at him. Human teeth.
“OK,” he agreed, his voice cracking a bit. “This
isn’t
a skull.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she swore, leaping to her feet and pulling her bottoms on. “I’ve been playing fuckin’ footsy with a dead guy for the last five minutes.”
Mark dropped the skull. It rolled to the side, and he could see the back of its braincase was broken. It almost looked chewed…
“Better or worse than a spider?” he offered, but she didn’t hear. She was already running for the beach to call to the others.
In The Air
Billy and Casey moved into shallow water, both of them clumsily trying to push their coverings back into some semblance of
covering
as they stumbled to shore.
“What’s the matter?” Billy said when he reached Jess, who waited impatiently at the water’s edge.
“There’s a dead guy back there!” Jess announced.
Moments later they had all gathered around the skull. Billy reached down and gently pushed sand away from the area that the skull had come from, and soon had uncovered the bleached vertebrae of the neck, followed by the shoulders, collarbone and ribs. Then abruptly, he stopped.
“This guy hasn’t been dead that long,” he said, making a face.
“He’s nothing but bones,” Jess argued.
“Maybe up-top, but not down here.” Billy grimaced and wiped something dark, cool and sticky off the back of his hand on the sand.
And then they all made faces as the smell reached them, a stench of rotting meat mixed with the sour of bad fish.
“Jesus,” Mark said, stepping back.
As Billy stood up they could all see that just below the first couple of exposed ribs, a blackened gory mess yawned under the sand.
“But…what took all of the skin off his head?” Casey asked.
“Not just skin,” Billy answered. His voice sounded grim. “Something took hair, muscle, eyes, fat… without leaving a trace.”
“Fucking gross,” Mark said. Two hands grabbed his arm and squeezed. Jess.
“My
foot
was on him,” she said. Her voice sounded close to breaking.
Billy slapped a bug on his neck absently. “Well, at least you only touched the clean part.”
Casey echoed Billy, hitting her thigh with her palm. The air around them seemed to hum.
“So much for no bugs,” Mark said. He swatted at a tiny fly or gnat that circled his face.
“Um,” Casey said. “I think we should go.”
Billy turned to look at her, and then his gaze followed her arm, which pointed to a cloud of insects at the edge of the trees. They glittered like a violet constellation in the bright sun. Black and shimmering purple, the horde of tiny insects expanded from the forest in a cloud that grew broader by the second. The co-eds all began to slap at tiny bites as the buzz grew around them, and the air suddenly was alive with tiny beating wings.
“I think we should go now!” Casey screamed, and ran straight through the cloud towards the path of broken branches they had forged. The others followed close on her heels.
They ran through the jungle, the high-pitched hum of hunger all around them. The cloud followed. “Ouch,” Jess cried, swatting at the things that bit her neck and back.
“Keep moving,” Mark yelled, and pulled her by the hand. “In here,” he said, and led them all to the abandoned metal hut. He yanked open the door and they piled past him, collapsing on the floor as he slammed the door.
From outside, the sound of a thousand flies hummed. From inside, the sound of gasping breath and stifled crying filled the silence. Nobody spoke.
Mark ran a hand across his neck and came back with the remains of three smashed insects. “What are they?” he asked.
Billy looked closer, noting the black underbellies and purple slashes of color across their backs. They were the size of mosquitoes, but thicker. The missing link between a gnat and a housefly. He could just make out the iridescent bulging eyes that were reminiscent of a billion inhabitors of garbage cans and other sources of decay. The procreators of maggots. The death cleaners.
“Some kind of fly,” Billy said finally. “Never seen one like it before though.”
“I thought you knew this island,” Casey accused.
“Yeah, I did,” he said. “Things change.”
The one window to the outside remained obscured by a cloud of buzzing insects. They covered the glass, landing for a few seconds, crawling across it in jerky, fast steps and then rising in the air again to loop and soar, looking for something to still their hunger. The air vibrated with a muffled but constant, nearby hum.
“This is insane,” Casey complained. “We can’t just sit in here.” But she didn’t make a move to leave; she hunched down, back to a wall, arms hugging her shins.
Mark stood up and moved to the corner of the hut. He picked up one of the canisters, and turned it around in his hands, looking for a label. But it was unmarked.
“What are you thinking?” Billy asked.
“Looks like a pesticide sprayer to me,” Mark said, running a finger down the handle that would open the nozzle.
“One way to find out.” Billy got up and went to the door. He put a hand on the knob.
“I’ll open it, you put it out there and spray. See what happens. Just don’t go outside. I don’t want them swarming in here.”
“You can’t open the door,” Casey complained.
“Thought you didn’t want to sit here all afternoon?” Mark said.
“No. But they’ll go away sooner or later, right?”
Mark looked at the swarm outside the window. It showed no signs of moving on. “I’m not sure I believe that at the moment.”
Nobody spoke for a few minutes. They all just listened to the buzzing. Finally Mark walked to the door, and turned the knob. He set the canister on the floor and pushed the door open a crack, just enough to stick the nozzle tube through. Then he grabbed the pump handle on the canister, pulled it up as high as it would go, and slowly pushed it back down. Even though the door was nearly closed, the hut was instantly filled with the smell of strong pesticide. But nobody said a word about the smell, because they were all paying attention to what was going on outside. Outside where the flies were dropping off the window by the dozens. A cloud of silvery white mist ballooned beyond the glass of the window and expanded away from the hut and into the trees.
Mark stopped spraying and pulled the nozzle back inside the room.
“Did it work?” he asked, and joined the others at the window. Outside, the mist dissipated like fog in a slow wind, until the deep green of the trees and bushes beyond were crisp and clear again. The air had grown silent.
“I can’t see a single bug,” Billy whispered. “That shit is good!”
They moved towards the door as one, and slowly pushed it open. The air smelled strongly of chemicals, but otherwise, the area was empty. The ground glittered with violet chitin; so many had fallen that the ground crunched as they walked.
“Back to the tents?” Billy asked.
“Uh, duh,” Jess said. “I wish we’d never left the beach.”
Jess moved ahead of all of them, rushing down the path littered with broken branches from their initial walk across the island.
In minutes, the stench of the spray had faded away and the island scents of palm and saltwater took away the horror of the hour before. Jess was almost smiling when they broke through the edge of the trees and bushes and stepped back out onto the golden sand where they’d pitched their tents.
Only.
The sun-bright grains of sand were largely obscured.
The beach in front of them appeared to move. A wave of purple spiders shifted one way and the other, creeping closer to the treeline with every moment. Jess had just opened her mouth to say something cheerful like, “home again!” when her eyes registered what was really in front of them.
Jess screamed.
The tents were crawling with the creatures, purple legs and feelers shifting to and fro as they explored and tasted the fabric.
“Holy shit,” Billy whispered. “There’s a million of them.”
Jess grabbed Mark’s arm and barely contained a scream. “We have to go,” she said for the second time that afternoon.
“Our stuff,” Casey said. “They’re all over our stuff. They’re probably in our clothes. And our food…we need to get to the boat.”
“I’m not just leaving our tents and equipment here,” Billy protested. “I borrowed most of this shit. Plus…” he pointed at the sun, now falling deep in the west on the horizon. “I don’t really want to navigate the keys in the dark if we don’t have to.”
“The hut had beds,” Mark suggested. “And an airtight door.”
Jess began pulling him back towards the trees instantly.
“I need my stuff,” Casey complained. She rubbed a hand across Billy’s shoulders. “Would you…get my overnight bag for me?”